Mystical Experience

[simple_soul]

Dear Simple Soul

You have a wonderful name. Please don’t be afraid to criticize or question my assumptions (I’m wrong a lot I assure you!), even though I am fully aware that you aren’t in this instance anyhow.

The fire is a ‘symbol’ employed by many mystical writers. It is an ‘interior’ fire that they speak of, a soul ‘burning’ with the love of God. If I may quote from the “Life” of St. Catherine of Genoa to illustrate what she means by the “fire”. In this example, Catherine is described by her confessor

catholicfirst.com/thefait…inegenoa2.html

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI spoke about St. Catherine’s experiences in one of his general audience addresses thus:

vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2011/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20110112_en.html

St. Catherine, like all mystics, was confronted with ineffability, the incapacity of an individual to adequately express in words what they have ‘experienced’, which is one of the hallmarks of a ‘mystical experience’. Thus we find her exclaim:

Consider this sentence from the passage I quoted in my last post:

This is the ‘crux’ so to speak, where St. Catherine struggles to try and explain to her audience in sensual terms cognizable to their understanding what was for her an entirely non-sensuous experience. Can you imagine seeing without eyes, hearing without ears, feeling without feeling, tasting without tasting yet being aware of something so amazing, so “divine” that every word you previously would have used to explain it is incapable of capturing it adequately? That is a mystical experience of union with God. Words and images can never do it justice.

Hi Vouthon,

Thank you for trying to explain but I am not sure it answers my question.
How would she know she was experiencing anything,Divine or not, unless she was using her senses? This is what I might be having a hard time wrapping my brain around. Let me see if I can explain my thoughts on this.
After reading what you wrote here I am almost lead to believe that you believe that if one is using there senses then they are being sensual. Is this a correct understanding? It is my understanding that one can use ones senses and it does not mean they are being sensual. Maybe this is also why I am having a difficult time understanding.
As I am writing this I am remembering reading something some one posted someplace about how infused prayer suspends the senses. I am wondering if this means the senses are turned off or is this what some people take it to mean. Maybe this is also another way I am misunderstanding them. Or maybe this was just how I was understanding the term. But then in just reading your post that I questioned, it made me question my understanding of this term. If the term “suspend the senses” is in fact meant as in “turn off the senses” and if her senses had been turned off how would she have ever known that Christ was now living in her and not herself? How could she even want to even try to explain something she deemed was so Divine. Did she not sense the Divinity within herself? To me, because she is explaining things, or at least trying to explain things, her senses were not turned off. Just suspended there. It’s like yes there turned off but yet at the same time there not? Oh the Mysteries of God. The image I get is like the senses are like stones or large rocks around a light, so tightly fused together that the light has a hard time seeping through the cracks between them. It is like they are trying to protect this light. This light is our soul. When I read or here about the senses being suspended, I visually see these stones as opening up and the cracks become wider and wider until they conceal the soul’s light no more and are now suspended like hovering around the soul no longer needing to protect it and letting God protect it and do His work in the soul as He transforms it as the sense seem to hover there suspended quietly op serving and watching or looking on but not engaging in anything and now the soul shines so brightly and warmly that the sense now bathe in its light. It is like they, the senses, are transformed also. It is like they are no longer needed to protect any more but can now be used for something else.Oh how I ramble on. I did have other thoughts I wanted to share but I do need to stop right now because my children are waking up and it’s a start to a long Christmas and New Years break and want to make the most of it. If you or others want to share some insight into helping me understand this better please do. Just please don’t be insulted if I do not find the time to respond.
It was all just a question that seemed to send me a chains of thoughts and more questions and can become a never ending cycle for me.
Anyway hope and pray you have a wonderful and peace filled and joyful Christmas and New Year that knowing you are in God’s loving embrace can bring us through knowing He is with us.

 

[simple_soul]

:twocents:

If by the term understanding,
what is meant has to do with ideas, concepts and stuff that can be communicated,
you may be selling yourself short.

The yearning that lies at the core of who we are as human persons,
is not fulfilled by simply a mystical experience in itself,
which often can lead to spiritual pride,
let alone the possession of an intellectual description detached
from the one true relationship with God, who is ever-present.

This very moment God is here,
however wondrous or humdrum it all seems;
it is all fathomless mystery.
Our soul weaves together perceptions and thoughts
into this tapestry of every day life.

How amazing,
the mundane resting on eternity,
cries out for God.

Amazing indeed!
Thank you for sharing your two sense.

 

[Vouthon]

How would she know she was experiencing anything,Divine or not, unless she was using her senses? This is what I might be having a hard time wrapping my brain around. Let me see if I can explain my thoughts on this.
After reading what you wrote here I am almost lead to believe that you believe that if one is using there senses then they are being sensual. Is this a correct understanding? It is my understanding that one can use ones senses and it does not mean they are being sensual. Maybe this is also why I am having a difficult time understanding.
As I am writing this I am remembering reading something some one posted someplace about how infused prayer suspends the senses. I am wondering if this means the senses are turned off or is this what some people take it to mean. Maybe this is also another way I am misunderstanding them. Or maybe this was just how I was understanding the term. But then in just reading your post that I questioned, it made me question my understanding of this term. If the term “suspend the senses” is in fact meant as in “turn off the senses” and if her senses had been turned off how would she have ever known that Christ was now living in her and not herself? How could she even want to even try to explain something she deemed was so Divine. Did she not sense the Divinity within herself?

Dear Simple Soul

Thank you for your reflections and insights.

Mystical prayer or contemplation is beyond sense perception because union with God is above the natural capabilities of human nature. The reason for this is not because sense knowledge is “sensual” in a sinful sense, we are not after all Gnostics and we believe in the resurrection of the body. Rather it is because the contemplative experiences God within Him, “not as an object or thing about which something is known, but simply as a whole, a subject. God is present to him in a way analogous to the way he is present to himself” to quote one scholar. The whole point about union with God is that we see God as He sees Himself. God is pure spirit, as the Bible tells us, which means that our sense knowledge could never attain this unitive state.

St. John of the Cross tells us:

At this time God does not communicate Himself through the senses as He did before, by means of the discursive analysis and synthesis of ideas, but begins to communicate Himself through pure spirit by an act of simple contemplation, in which there is no discursive succession of thought.

You will recall that St. Paul said in the Bible, “whether I was in or outside my body I do not know.” This is a mystical experience. If I may quote Bishop Hedley of Newport again:

Dublin Review, 1876

There is a state of mental prayer, ordinarily preceded by less perfect states, which has the following characteristics:

1. It dispenses, to a very great extent, with the use of sensible
   images or pictures in the mind. Instead of "pictures’, the soul seems
   overshadowed by a spreading, silence as of something near at
   hand, vague in outline, colourless and dim; such as might
   fall upon one who watches intently some dark curtain which hides
   an awful presence.

1. It dispenses with reasoning, or what is called ‘discourse’. In
   the state of prayer which is called contemplation, the mind remains
   steadfast and fixed in one simple gaze.

1. This intuition is accompanied by ardent love. An intuition
   by which we gaze upon our last end and only good, not in any
   abstract way,’ but as, here and now, our complete joy and perfect
   bliss, means an intuition of love.

4.** Whilst contemplation lasts, the soul does not perceive what
she is doing. She is so engaged with God that she does not turn in
reflection upon herself**. She does not need to invent motives; she
has attained, for a time, the object and end of all motive. Hence
the dictum of the desert, that he who was conscious he was praying,
was not yet arrived at perfect prayer. Contemplation is ‘perfect’ prayer,
comparatively with the states that precede it; but in itself it is merely the
first resting-place of a mountain region in which height reaches beyond
height until human thought refuses to follow

 

[simple_soul]

Dear Simple Soul

Thank you for your reflections and insights.

Mystical prayer or contemplation is beyond sense perception because union with God is above the natural capabilities of human nature. The reason for this is not because sense knowledge is “sensual” in a sinful sense, we are not after all Gnostics and we believe in the resurrection of the body. Rather it is because the contemplative experiences God within Him, “not as an object or thing about which something is known, but simply as a whole, a subject. God is present to him in a way analogous to the way he is present to himself” to quote one scholar. The whole point about union with God is that we see God as He sees Himself. God is pure spirit, as the Bible tells us, which means that our sense knowledge could never attain this unitive state.

St. John of the Cross tells us:

You will recall that St. Paul said in the Bible, “whether I was in or outside my body I do not know.” This is a mystical experience. If I may quote Bishop Hedley of Newport again:

Dublin Review, 1876

Hi Vouthon.

I believe part of my confusion is I am taking “sense” as in we all have five senses, six if your counting the sixth sense. I think from reading this post of yours is that you are speaking of sense as in “making sense of things.”

Is that correct?

 

[Gary_Sheldrake]

I have never had a mystical experience praying, attending Mass, or reading Scripture.

I have, though, had mystical experiences reading non-religious books, visiting a shopping mall, listening to music, and watching a movie.

What ought I make of this (other than that I am not suited to a clerical vocation)?

Good Morning Bubba Switzler: There are all sorts of mystical experiences. So when you have these experiences, what happens? What do you feel, and what do you think they are telling you?

All the best,
Gary

 

[Bubba_Switzler]

Good Morning Bubba Switzler: There are all sorts of mystical experiences. So when you have these experiences, what happens? What do you feel, and what do you think they are telling you?

I’ve been following the discussion in this thread trying to figure this out.

It’s not like in the movies, there is no obscuration of reality or voices or anything dramatic like that. It’s more like a feeling washing over me and a focus on certain concepts and ideas but nothing so clearly that I would say they were telling me something, or at least, I have not yet figured it out precisely. It’s very sublime but also very personal; I never got the feeling that this was something prophetic, more like vocational.

I can’t recall if I was especially silent in my thinking at the moment but that is plausible. On the occasion the mall visits, I was just taggging along with the wife and kids and taking in the experience of all the people around me and the visual feast of the mall itself.

I know that’s not very helpful.

 

[Robert_Sock]

Our entire life is a mystical experience, filled with good and evil. “How is it that we are here?”

LOVE!

 

[Mystical_Seeker]

Our entire life is a mystical experience, filled with good and evil. “How is it that we are here?”

LOVE!

 

[Gary_Sheldrake]

I’ve been following the discussion in this thread trying to figure this out.

It’s not like in the movies, there is no obscuration of reality or voices or anything dramatic like that. It’s more like a feeling washing over me and a focus on certain concepts and ideas but nothing so clearly that I would say they were telling me something, or at least, I have not yet figured it out precisely. It’s very sublime but also very personal; I never got the feeling that this was something prophetic, more like vocational.

I can’t recall if I was especially silent in my thinking at the moment but that is plausible. On the occasion the mall visits, I was just taggging along with the wife and kids and taking in the experience of all the people around me and the visual feast of the mall itself.

I know that’s not very helpful.

Thank you Bubba. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I only wish it was something we could replicate at will, but it has a mind of it’s own.

All the best,
Gary