Comparative Mysticism

[Julia_Mae]

You have not stated your religion so I’m not sure where your basis in belief lies, but from a Catholic perspective we believe “uncreated essence” as you call it, is not a part of our human nature.

I’m Catholic, and yes, we do believe that, if we agree that the Uncreated Essence is God. In each of us God places what was described to me by a priest as “a spark of the Holy Spirit.” Catholic mystics refer to finding God within.

The only “uncreated” anything is God. All else has been created by him. It is very important to separate the creatures from the Creator or we end up in idolatry. To put it simply, there is a God and he is not me.

I don’t agree we would end up in idolatry. We have this problem of only being able to perceive in three-dimensionality and linearly in terms of Time while relating to one another through our brains. God in the contemplative act takes us out out of that. Then, we end up back here trying to discuss, describe or recall what we cannot begin to comprehend of our experience.

Paul didn’t know if he was in the body or out of the body.

Do we become oned with God by becoming part of instead of apart from? Do we lose all otherness? Can we conceive of doing that while still having a sense of self to surrender?

I’d be interested in what the Buddhist has to say about these ideas.

 

[Julia_Mae]

However it truly is a union of “indistinction” with God from the perspective of the deified person. the lines between Lover and Beloved become indistinct from the perspective of the person experiencing it, even while they remain different from God in essence, they become so pure that they are in a sense God by grace. …

Thus Saint Catherine of Siena:

Now one might think when she says, “My I is God” that this is a powerful connection to Vedanta. However she goes on to explain that “I do not know where the I is, nor do I seek it, nor do I wish to know or be cognizant of it”. She has a powerful experience of having no “I-hood” at all.

This is my experience. This is, I believe, our ultimate destination, our most basic and eternal desire.

 

[Julia_Mae]

Interesting descriptions of union. The Buddhist tradition generally tries to avoid too much description of Nibbana in order to prevent misunderstanding, and so usually used a rather apophatic means of describing it. The exception to this is the use of certain rather poetic titles given to Nibbana which seek to more evoke an understanding of Nibbana than describe it…

This is why I believe words are the worst possible medium for expressing the inexpressible. I think color and form are better, music best of all. Of what we can create. It’s why we always must speak in analogy of Holy Truths. All we can give are parts of experience. My favorite name for God is neti-neti.

 

[SteveVH]

I’m Catholic, and yes, we do believe that, if we agree that the Uncreated Essence is God. In each of us God places what was described to me by a priest as “a spark of the Holy Spirit.” Catholic mystics refer to finding God within.

I think it is important that we make a distinction between having an “uncreated essence” as part of our nature (which we do not) and having the only “uncreated essence”, God, dwelling in us through his own will.

There is a New Age belief out there that we are God, if we only search the depths of our being we will find that we have divine power within us, naturally. It is this notion that is false and I just wanted to make that clear.

 

[hazcompat]

The Inadequacy of Knowledge

Uselessness of all Created Things as Means to Union Inadequacy of Natural and Supernatural Knowledge

Here one feels the heartbeat of our Holy Father. He speaks of the great truth that he has recognized; it is his mission to proclaim it: our goal is union with God, our way that of the crucified Christ, our becoming one with him takes place when we are crucified. The only proportionate means to arrive at this union is faith. This will now be demonstrated by showing that no other real or imagined thing is capable of effecting it. Every means must be proportionate to its goal. Only “that which brings about union with God and which has the greatest similarity to God” can serve as a means to union with God. This cannot be applied to any created being. Certainly all have some kind of connection with God and bear a certain trace of God in themselves. “Yet God has no relation or essential likeness to creatures. For the disparity between his divine Being and theirs is infinite. Therefore it is also impossible that the intellect can comprehend God perfectly through the means of anything created, be it heavenly or earthly.” Even the angels and saints are so far removed from the divine Being that the intellect cannot attain to God through them. This is true of everything concerning “that which can be imagined or received and understood by the intellect in this life.”

The Science of the Cross (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Vol. 6) Chapter 5

The Holy Father she refers to is St. John of The Cross

Peace

 

[Julia_Mae]

I think it is important that we make a distinction between having an “uncreated essence” as part of our nature (which we do not) and having the only “uncreated essence”, God, dwelling in us through his own will…

Okay.

 

[Vouthon]

So does union fit into a larger sort of roadmap of mystical experience?

Yes. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), categorized prayer into nine levels. Fr. Aumann notes (Ibid., p.316):

**"Her concept that the intensity of one’s life of prayer coincides with the intensity of one’s charity is based on solid theology and was confirmed by St. Pius X, who stated that the grades of prayer taught by St. Teresa represent so many grades of elevation and ascent toward Christian perfection.

These grades are (1) vocal prayer, (2) meditation, (3) affective prayer, (4) prayer of simplicity, (5) infused contemplation, (6) prayer of quiet, (7) prayer of union, (8) prayer of conforming union, and (9) prayer of transforming union. The first four grades belong to the predominantly ascetical stage of spiritual life; the remaining five grades are infused prayer and belong to the mystical phase of spiritual life." **

The problem is that there are so many different “roadmaps” in Catholicism outlining different stages in the spiritual life that it would be best to focus on one in particular, or each at a time, and go with that. Each religious order has slight, or sometimes significant, variations. There is no defined number although their are recognised experiences common to all the “ways”. The experience is always a uniquely personal one for each individual. Pope Benedict XVI therefore once said that “there are as many paths to God as there are human beings” in an interview with Peter Seewald ie

"…**Interviewer: **

*How many ways are there to God? *

**Pope Benedict XVI: **

As many ways as there are people. For even within the same faith each man’s way is an entirely personal one. In that respect there is ultimately one way, and everyone who is on the way to God is therefore in some sense also on the way to Jesus Christ. But this does not mean that all ways are identical in terms of consciousness and will but on the contrary, the one way is so big that it becomes a personal way for each man…"

- Pope Benedict XVI, Salt of the Earth, 1997 (when he was Cardinal Ratzinger Head of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith)

There is no single defined way, like the Noble Eightfold Path, that an aspiring contemplative has to follow or adhere too. They could even write a mystical treatise on their own new way!

The basic experiences are the same, however. There is always a phase of ascetical endeavour wherein the person purges the affections and their desires, there is always an emphasis on detachment from sense, there is always an experience of light and/or lights, heat in the body, illuminations or wisdom acquired spontaneously into the nature of things, union…etc. The way is different and the literary expressions are too but the basic experience is the same.

In Eastern Christianity, the tradition of Hesychasm is more of a universal, structured, systematic roadmap, with the repetitive Jesus Prayer at the heart of it, or self-activating prayer of the heart as it is known. Western Christianity is more disorganised, although deliberately so as to allow for a variety of expressions of the one mystery.

We call these paths mystical itineraries. The most basic division is three: Purgative, Illuminative & Unitative. That goes back to the Desert Fathers of the late second, early third to fourth centuries AD. The “Threefold Way” of Dionysius, William of St Thierry and Saint Bonaventure (a Doctor of the Church) which is called “purgative, illuminative and unitative” and is the most basic system utilized in some manner by all the schools.

Even union itself has different levels of intimacy, of completeness one could say. Van Ruusbroec discerns a “union through an intermediary”, a “union without intermediary” and finally a union “without difference or distinction” with God. St. Teresa discerns a difference between “(7) prayer of union, (8) prayer of conforming union, and (9) prayer of transforming union” in her nine stages.

 

[Vouthon]

Nibbana is referred to as the uncreated, unborn, unmade. Nibbana is the goal of Buddhists.

Ultimately we aim for union with the Absolute, the Highest Good, God Himself.

But what is “God”? That might seem a strange question to ask. I mean not God as a theological concept (ie the Most Holy Trinity, the creator) but rather as a lived reality experienced by the mystic.

That reality is described by Ruusbroec as such. I highlight certain key phrases of this “experience”:

“…The God-seeing man . . . can always enter,* naked and unencumbered with images*, into the inmost part of his spirit. There he finds revealed an Eternal Light. . . . It [his spirit] is undifferentiated and without distinction, and therefore it feels nothing but the unity…Such enlightened men are, with a free spirit, lifted above reason into a bare and imageless vision, wherein lives the eternal indrawing summons of the Divine Unity…There follows the union without distinction. Enlightened men have found within themselves an essential contemplation which is above reason and beyond reason, and a fruitive tendency which pierces through every condition and all being, and in which they immerse themselves in a wayless abyss of fathomless beatitude where the Trinity of the Divine Persons possess their nature in the essential unity. Behold this beatitude is so onefold and so wayless that in it every . . . creaturely distinction ceases and passes away. . . There all light is turned to darkness; there the three Persons give place to the essential unity and abide without distinction…According to *the simple void which embraces all things *he [the enlightened man] finds and feels himself to be that same Light with which he sees, and nothing but that…The abysmal waylessness of God is so dark and so unconditioned that it swallows up within itself every Divine way and activity, and all the attributes of the Persons within the rich compass of the essential unity. . . . This is the dark silence in which all lovers lose themselves. But if we would prepare ourselves for it . . . we should strip ourselves of all but our very bodies, and we should see forth into the wild sea, whence no created thing can draw us back again…”

***- Blessed Jan Van Ruusbroec (1294-1381), Flemish mystic & Catholic priest ***

I think that the fact that God is “unconditioned” and a “simple void” or “wayless abyss” and that the mystic experiences being through the grace of deification himself unconditioned could be significant in relation to Buddhist nibbana/nirvana. Ruusbroec speaks also of a “a fruitive tendency which pierces through every condition” to reach the Unconditioned. This ‘fruitive tendency’ is to be found within the deepest part of us through contemplation. Could the “fruitive tendency” towards the Uncreated that lies innate within us - distinguished from the Uncreated itself - be something akin to the Mahayana idea of Buddha Nature understood in that denomination of Buddhism to mean an innate potencial for enlightenment, for nirvana?

Given Ruusbroec’s poetic imagery, some explanation is in order as to his use of “darkness” and “light”. WT Stace, a scholar of mystical experience, explains:

“…We note in the passage just quoted that the essence of the experience is that in this bare imageless vision there is found the One, the ultimate Unity, which is here identified with the Divine…Darkness is a metaphor for the absence of all distinction. The metaphor presumably derives from the fact that all visual distinctions disappear in the dark…There is no contradiction except that already involved in the basic paradox of the positive experience of a negative void. That God is light is the common metaphor for his goodness and blessedness. That He is darkness only refers to the absence of distinctions. In Christian mysticism the two metaphors are often forced together for the sake of paradox. Thus Suso speaks of the beatific vision as a “dazzling obscurity.” Silence is another metaphor aoten used for distinctionlessness…”

What do you think of this Bakmoon and Notself? Is there anything akin to what Ruusbroec has experienced in the Pali Canon?

 

[Julia_Mae]

Ultimately we aim for union with the Absolute, the Highest Good, God Himself.

But what is “God”? That might seem a strange question to ask. I mean not God as a theological concept (ie the Most Holy Trinity, the creator) but rather as a lived reality experienced by the mystic.

This is from one of my blog posts:

…what I knew was that God was not Father, Son and Holy Spirit, though He is that, also. But that God was …. beyond. Beyond any possible limits of the universe. So far away that the idea of distance becomes irrelevant. So close, it takes less than a moment to reach Him. Beyond any kind of idea we can ever have of Him. Beyond being a “Him” or an anything at all that we can imagine.

This is, of course, Thomas Merton:

In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. … “God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it.”
–Thomas Merton

I’d be interested in reading more descriptions of this from other pray-ers.

 

[hazcompat]

Second reading
From the treatise on Flight from the World by Saint Ambrose, bishop
Hold fast to God, the one true good

Where a man’s heart is, there is his treasure also. God is not accustomed to refusing a good gift to those who ask for one. Since he is good, and especially to those who are faithful to him, let us hold fast to him with all our soul, our heart, our strength, and so enjoy his light and see his glory and possess the grace of supernatural joy. Let us reach out with our hearts to possess that good, let us exist in it and live in it, let us hold fast to it, that good which is beyond all we can know or see and is marked by perpetual peace and tranquillity, a peace which is beyond all we can know or understand.

This is the good that permeates creation. In it we all live, on it we all depend. It has nothing above it; it is divine. No one is good but God alone. What is good is therefore divine, what is divine is therefore good. Scripture says: When you open your hand all things will be filled with goodness. It is through God’s goodness that all that is truly good is given us, and in it there is no admixture of evil.

These good things are promised by Scripture to those who are faithful: The good things of the land will be your food.

We have died with Christ. We carry about in our bodies the sign of his death, so that the living Christ may also be revealed in us. The life we live is not now our ordinary life but the life of Christ: a life of sinlessness, of chastity, of simplicity and every other virtue. We have risen with Christ. Let us live in Christ, let us ascend in Christ, so that the serpent may not have the power here below to wound us in the heel.

Let us take refuge from this world. You can do this in spirit, even if you are kept here in the body. You can at the same time be here and present to the Lord. Your soul must hold fast to him, you must follow after him in your thoughts, you must tread his ways by faith, not in outward show. You must take refuge in him. He is your refuge and your strength. David addresses him in these words: I fled to you for refuge, and I was not disappointed.

Since God is our refuge, God who is in heaven and above the heavens, we must take refuge from this world in that place where there is peace, where there is rest from toil, where we can celebrate the great sabbath, as Moses said: The sabbaths of the land will provide you with food. To rest in the Lord and to see his joy is like a banquet, and full of gladness and tranquillity.

Let us take refuge like deer beside the fountain of waters. Let our soul thirst, as David thirsted, for the fountain. What is that fountain? Listen to David: With you is the fountain of life. Let my soul say to this fountain: When shall I come and see you face to face? For the fountain is God himself.

Peace

 

[Vouthon]

The problem is that there are so many different “roadmaps” in Catholicism outlining different stages in the spiritual life that it would be best to focus on one in particular, or each at a time, and go with that. Each religious order has slight, or sometimes significant, variations. There is no defined number although their are recognised experiences common to all the “ways”. The experience is always a uniquely personal one for each individual. Pope Benedict XVI therefore once said that “there are as many paths to God as there are human beings” in an interview with Peter Seewald ie

There is no single defined way, like the Noble Eightfold Path, that an aspiring contemplative has to follow or adhere too. They could even write a mystical treatise on their own new way!.

In furtherance of what I said above, let me quote St. John of the Cross:

“…God leads every soul by a separate path, and you will scarcely meet with one spirit which agrees with another in one half of the way by which it advances…”

- St. John of the Cross (1542 – 1591), Carmelite mystic & Doctor if the Church

 

[hazcompat]

The paths are pray-er disciplines. There is only one Way, Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

Peace

 

[Vouthon]

The paths are pray-er disciplines. There is only one Way, Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

Peace

As usual, you hit the nail on the head

 

[Celticnovice]

In Eastern Christianity, the tradition of Hesychasm is more of a universal, structured, systematic roadmap, with the repetitive Jesus Prayer at the heart of it, or self-activating prayer of the heart as it is known. **Western Christianity is more disorganised, although deliberately so as to allow for a variety of expressions of the one mystery.
**

Yes I have made the same observation here…Case in point being the Cloud of UnKnowing where the author talks about how methods “are not the focus” then goes on for what like 60 chapters about a method…

 

[Michael_Mayo]

I happened upon St Catherine of Siena’s Treatise of Prayer. This is the TAN publication with “Thee” & “Thou”. The same as I found here on line. I would like to see *The Classics of Western Spirituality *translation.

Anyway, she says:

"When the soul has passed through the doctrine of Christ crucified, with true love of virtue and hatred of vice, and has arrived at the house of self-knowledge and entered therein, she remains, with her door barred, in watching and constant prayer, separated entirely from the consolations of the world.

How often we might focus more on a method than on the conversion of our entire lives from vice to virtue. I think that has been the main warning of the Church regarding “New Age” techniques. Conversion & penance are preliminary.

I like this part about how the Lord works in the soul during a “visit” raising it in prayer. [My Bolds]

The soul, therefore, should season the knowledge of herself with the knowledge of My goodness, and then vocal prayer will be of use to the soul who makes it, and pleasing to Me, and she will arrive, from the vocal imperfect prayer, exercised with perseverance, at perfect mental prayer; but if she simply aims at completing her tale, and, for vocal abandons mental prayer, she will never arrive at it.

Sometimes the soul will be so ignorant that, having resolved to say so many prayers vocally, and I, visiting her mind sometimes in one way, and sometimes in another, in a flash of self-knowledge or of contrition for sin, sometimes in the broadness of My charity, and sometimes by placing before her mind, in diverse ways, according to My pleasure and the desire of the soul, the presence of My Truth, she (the soul), in order to complete her tale, will abandon My visitation, that she feels, as it were, by conscience, rather than abandon that which she had begun.

She should not do so, for, in so doing, she yields to a deception of the Devil. The moment she feels her mind disposed by My visitation, in the many ways I have told you, she should abandon vocal prayer; then, My visitation past, if there be time, she can resume the vocal prayers which she had resolved to say, but if she has not time to complete them, she ought not on that account to be troubled or suffer annoyance and confusion of mind; of course provided that it were not the Divine office which clerics and religious are bound and obliged to say under penalty of offending Me, for, they must, until death, say their office.

But if they, at the hour appointed for saying it, should feel their minds drawn and raised by desire, they should so arrange as to say it before or after My visitation, so that the debt of rendering the office be not omitted. But, in any other case, vocal prayer should be immediately abandoned for the said cause. Vocal prayer, made in the way that I have told you, will enable the soul to arrive at perfection, and therefore she should not abandon it, but use it in the way that I have told you.
ewtn.com/library/SOURCES/CATHDIAL.HTM

 

[Michael_Mayo]

Hi, Bakmoon, Vouthon,

It’s good to read your comments after such a long break.

This could also be a description of nibbana. Perhaps once one strips away the words of all religious teaching, the goal is the same, to become in union with the uncreated good.

Impossible to talk about what which is beyond words. All the more impossible to categorize other than by the starting point of which spiritual tradition.

 

[hazcompat]

These are the Sacraments
as described by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
Ph.D., D.D., LL.D., Litt.D.

Man is made in the Image and Likeness of God.

A young Wife, who had been taking Instructions for a Year, told the Writer she could Believe everything in the Faith, except the Eucharist. Upon inquiring-about her Husband, it was learned that he was in the Pacific, on Military Duty. In answer to further questions, she admitted that she Corresponded-with him every Two (2) Days, and that she had his Photograph before her, in the House.

We argued there was nothing Wanting-for Perfect Happiness. What more could she Want, than the Constant-Memory of him, through the Photograph and a Written-communication, in which Heart poured-out-to Heart. But, she Protested that she could never be Truly Happy, except-through Union (1)-with her Husband.

But, it was retorted, if Human Love craves Oneness , shall not Divine Love? If Husband and Wife seek-to-be One in the Flesh, shall not the Christian and Christ crave-for that Oneness with One-another? The Memory of the Christ Who lived Twenty Centuries ago, the recalling-of His Mercy and Miracles through Memory, the correspondence-with Him by-reading the Scriptures – all these are Satisfying, but they do not Satisfy Love. There must-be, on the Level-of Grace, something Unitive with Divine Love. Every Heart seeks a Happiness outside it, and since Perfect Love is God, then the Heart-of Man and the Heart-of Christ must, in some-way, Fuse . In Human Friendship, the other-Person is Loved as another-Self, or the other-Half of One’s Soul. Divine Friendship must have its ‘Mutual-Indwelling’: “He who dwells-in Love, dwells-in God, and God in him” (1John 4:17). This Aspiration-of the Soul for its Ecstasy is fulfilled-in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

Peace

 

[Little_Star_1]

The Science of the Cross (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Vol. 6)
Re: The Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul

"John did not write them as an artist who wishes to form a fully conceived and well rounded whole. Nor did he want to construct, as a theologian, a system of mysticism nor, as philosopher and psychologist, a complete, extended doctrine on the passions. He wrote as a father and teacher for his spiritual sons and daughters. He wished to comply with their request that he explain his spiritual songs. "

Quoting .Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Chapter 14 entitled The Kinds of Divine Union

“We must remember here that John has distinguished three kinds of union with God. 1 By means of the first God dwells substantially in all created things and sustains their existence. By the second, we are to understand the indwelling of God in the soul through grace; by the third, the transforming union through perfect love that divinizes the soul.”

From The Philokalia

St Gregory Palamas, supporting his argument with frequent quotations from the fathers, maintains that there is a distinction-in-unity between God’s essence and His energies.
The divine essence signifies God’s absolute transcendence, and we humans will never participate in it, either in this life or in the age to come. The divine energies, on the other hand, permeate the entire creation, and we humans participate in them by grace (§§ 65, 78). Thus deification (theosis) and union with God signify union with God’s energies, not His essence (§ 75). That which the energies effect and produce is created, but the divine energies themselves are supernatural, eternal and uncreated (§§ 72-73). The energies are Trinitarian, proceeding from all three persons at once.

further…
Our theosis is in no sense merely symbolical or metaphorical: it is a genuine
and specific reality, a pure gift of grace experienced even in this present life.

…i have to run but hope to contribute to this thread

Peaced

I wish I could explain how it is I understand what is described here, but I do and know that I have experienced what it describes.

 

[Julia_Mae]

I wish I could explain how it is I understand what is described here, but I do and know that I have experienced what it describes.

If you could explain it, you probably wouldn’t understand it. I believe this is what “ineffable” means.

 

[hazcompat]

I wish I could explain how it is I understand what is described here, but I do and know that I have experienced what it describes.

Pray without ceasing.

Peace