Trying to understand, would this count or is it too mundane/dotty?
A while after becoming a Christian, and at some points since, there was a sure knowledge of being part of something/someone much greater (as untheoretical as knowing I have hands) allied with a strong sense that everything will turn out fine with or without me. No rosy glow or fear involved, wasn’t even looking for it, it just kind of fell on me unannounced and lasted months. Hard to put into words, it was just a fact of life for a while.
I had to try to describe it at my water Baptism and likened it to a dare game we played as kids. We would canoe into a long dark canal tunnel without a torch or lights until the entrance was a tiny far off speck and everything was way scary, and then coming out a great sense of refuge in the blinding sunlight. Strip away the imagery and just leave the feeling and you’ve got it. The closest scripture I could find to be read out was psalm 131.
As I’ve said elsewhere, (secretly
) I’ve had, as more than care to admit have had, such an experience. Depending on accident of birth or education, we have, or don’t, some verbiage that for us points to this experience.
Since such a happening takes place in what is the “I/me” quadrant of our experience, which is interior, and we try to convey that to the “we” quadrant of our experience, which also has an interior, we are forced to use some form or other of the “it” (objective/exterior) and “its” (interobjective) quadrants. In other “words” we have to use linguistic symbols which are arrived at as a loose consensus relative to several realms of experience. There is no way, when we think of the material world, that there is an analogy. But that material commonality can be used as you did, Inocente, to conjure an image that points to something interior. In other words, when we talk about such experiences with others, we engage in interpretation, which is the only public access we have to another’s interior world.
Now if we admit that there is but one Universe or Creation, then we have to go with the idea that our interiors are either fantasy or actual. If only I have an experience, then it may be fantasy. If many have it and it has certain characteristics, we might conclude that there is the element of reality present. And that is the case with your experience and mine, however we might describe the subjective particulars.
But here’s the thing: in the same way that a child models its perceptions and mental patterns on what it learns in the hypnotic stage of its life, up to about 7yo, we who have such experiences are to some degree constrained in our interpretations to that format. But that doesn’t exclude that there are other even more complete or thorough explanations which might even include our seemingly different take. And this is very much the case with mysticism. And it is why, though the great Catholic mystics are admired in the East in some traditions, we don’t do have that reciprocity in the Christian religions, or at best very grudgingly. And yet, by many markers, the experiences are very nearly identical, but couched, necessarily, in the language and paradigm of the experiencer.
And this is where rb has a contention with my presentation. By his lights it is necessary on the grounds of faith to exclude from his considerations the genuine experiences of other children of God who are looking at the image and likeness of God that they are, as we are, every one of us. So he finds it necessary, as do many, to be restrained toa particular mode of analysis and expression of these interior event which in fact are both cross cultural and trans religious because they take place at a level deeper and more primal than overt extrinsic religious belief.
A genuine mystical experience, had by anyone of any religion or lack of such, e.g Paul, does not take place in the realm of faith. It is superior to it and
may yield faith, but the faith it yields has by necessity to be in the terms available to the symbolism acquired by that particular mind. It may also yield something that transcends faith and touches the hem of Identity. It is an exceptionally rare individual who can over time generalize their experience to something more fundamental than the differences of religious paradigms that are patterned in the exterior world and acquired therefrom, whatever the original experience and transmission of its “revelator” was.
So I ask again: how many Gods are there? Since we answer “One,” it follows that those sincerely devoted to Reality may through specific interior effort, or grace, come to an internal vision and understanding of their contingency on God as an experience called “mystical” which transcends in any of four levels the yet divisive realm of dogmatic structures of mind as purported by religions or philosophies.
. You have to learn the difficult trick of not even recalling it for a day or two (that would take you back to square one). But after that nine times out of ten the solution is blindingly obvious. Doesn’t always work but when it does the subconscious or whatever has produced a stunningly simple answer all by itself.