Albert Einstein was asked toward the end of his life if he had any regrets. He answered: "I wish I had read more of the mystics earlier in my life." This is a significant confession, coming as it does from one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, a man who moved beyond the modern science of Newton and ushered in a postmodern science and consciousness.
In the West, the modern age (meaning the 16th to mid-20th centuries) was not only ignorant of, but actually hostile to, mysticism. As Theodore Roszak has put it, "The Enlightenment held mysticism up for ridicule as the worst offense against science and reason." Still today, both education and religion are often hostile to mysticism. Fundamentalism by definition is antimystical or distorts mysticism, and much of liberal theology and religion is so academic and left-brained that it numbs and ignores the right brain, which is our mystical brain. Seminaries teach few practices to access our mysticism. This is why many find religion so boring -- it lacks the adventure and inner exploration that our souls yearn for. As St. John of the Cross said, "Launch out into the deep."
This launching into the depths -- into the deep ocean of the unconscious and of the Great Self, which is connected to all things and to the Creator -- often gets stymied by Western religious dogma, guilt trips and institutional churchiness. The mystic gets starved. Patriarchal culture by itself is unable to tap into the deep feminine aspects of Divine Wisdom and Compassion and the heart. But the mystics, male and female, do not present a one-sided reality, as Patriarchy does. The yin/yang, female/male dialectic is alive and well in the mystical tradition. God as Mother is honored along with God as Father. Through this, mystics seek wisdom, not mere knowledge.
The West remains so out of touch with its own mystical tradition that many Westerners seeking mysticism still feel they have to go East to find it. While this can work for many brave and generous individuals, it cannot work for the entire culture. Carl Jung warned us that "we westerners cannot be pirates thieving wisdom from foreign shores that it has taken them centuries to develop as if our own culture was an error outlived."
Is Western culture an "error outlived"? Or is there wisdom deep within our roots that can be accessed anew and that can give us strength and understanding at this critical time when so much is falling apart the world over, when climate change and destruction of the earth accelerates and so many species are disappearing, while our banking systems and economic belief systems, our forms of education and forms of worship, are failing?
I believe that there is great wisdom in our species and in Western spiritual traditions, but that this needs a new birth and a fresh beginning. As a Westerner I must begin where I stand within my own culture and its traditions. This is where the Christian Mystics come in. We in the West must take these insights into our hearts on a regular basis, allow them to play in the heart, and then take them into our work and citizenship and family and community. This is how all healthy and deep awakenings happen; they begin with the heart and flow out from there.
The crises we find ourselves in as a species require that as a species we shake up all our institutions -- including our religious ones -- and reinvent them. Change is necessary for our survival, and we often turn to the mystics at critical times like this. Jung said: "Only the mystics bring what is creative to religion itself." Jesus was a mystic shaking up his religion and the Roman empire; Buddha was a mystic who shook up the prevailing Hinduism of his day; Gandhi was a mystic shaking up Hinduism and challenging the British empire; and Martin Luther King Jr. shook up his tradition and America's segregationist society. The mystics walk their talk and talk (often in memorable poetic phraseology) their walk.
For instance, this being the season of Earth Day, we might listen to the 12th century Abbess Hildegard of Bingen who was an amazing musician, painter, healer, writer (she wrote 10 books), scientist and poet. She posits an erotic relationship between the Divine and nature when she says: "As the Creator loves his creation, so creation loves the creator. Creation, of course, was fashioned to be adorned, to be showered, to be gifted with the love of the creator. The entire world has been embraced by this kiss."
Fr. Bede Griffiths was an English Benedictine monk who spent 50 years in India living and building up an ashram that was Christian and, in many respects, Hindu. He wrote a number of books on the coming together of Eastern and Western mysticism. He writes:
"Perhaps this is the deepest impression left by life in India, the sense of the sacred as something pervading the whole order of nature. Every hill and tree and river is holy, and the simplest human acts of eating and drinking, still more of birth and marriage, have all retained their sacred character. ... It is there that the West need to learn form the East the sense of the 'holy,' of a transcendent mystery which is immanent in everything and which gives an ultimate meaning to life..."
Thomas Berry was an American priest in the Passionist Order who called himself a "geologian." A student of world religions and of contemporary science, he was a great ecological prophet as is clear in his books, The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work, where he warns of the work we must do to reinvent our educational, economic, political and religious systems if we are to be a sustainable species on this endangered planet. He writes:
"The human venture depends absolutely on this quality of awe and reverence and joy in the Earth and all that lives and grows upon the Earth. ... In the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration. It is all an exuberant expression of existence itself ... A way is opening for each person to receive the total spiritual heritage of the human community as well as the total spiritual heritage of the universe. Within this context the religious antagonisms of the past can be overcome, the particular traditions can be vitalized, and the feeling of presence to a sacred universe can appear once more to dynamize and sustain human affairs."
Deep down, each one of us is a mystic. When we tap into that energy we become alive again and we give birth. From the creativity that we release is born the prophetic vision and work that we all aspire to realize as our gift to the world. We want to serve in whatever capacity we can. Getting in touch with the mystic inside is the beginning of our deep service.
Matthew Fox is the author of 28 books including 'Original Blessing,' 'The Reinvention of Work,' 'The Hidden Spirituality of Men', and most recently 'Christian Mystics,' of which this post is an excerpt. Visit Matthew Fox online.
Follow Matthew Fox on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fcscreationspir
Matthew Dowd: Rumi and St. Francis: Healing Wisdom for Today
Christian mysticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
New Book from Matthew Fox: Christian Mystics > New World Library
By analogy, science is giving us verbiage for modern description of this consciousness dimension. I have always thought that science is evolving - but doing so while facing backwards. I have lately come to think the same about religion. Both these ways of knowing instruct us from past accumulations, even if current work is being done. If the two ways of knowing just pooled their accumulated wisdom and metaphorically turned around to face the direction we are going.
My theme for several years now has been that if we re-think "religion" in terms of analogy to what science is telling us about physical reality, we can begin to transcend what separates humans in their individual religious expressions of a "to be discovered" universal spirituality. This would require a certain willingness of both science and religion to compromise. Language - terminology - seems the best place to begin.
But what are you actually saying ? That certain substances can induce states that are very similar to the mystical state ? I don't think anyone would want to disagree with that.
However, you go further and say that the use of these substances is the quickest and easiest way to get started on the spiritual journey. Am I wrong in thinking that it is the only way you have tried ?
One question that immediately comes to mind, mine anyway, is: why don't any of the geat spiritual teachers advocate this quickest and easiest way ? Why, in fact, do many warn against quick fixes and dependence on substances for spiritual experiences ? ''The path to God is not a circus.' (Yogananda)
Anyone who is serious about diving deep in to the ocean of Spirit, does well to realise the enormous powers lying dormant in us. Therefore, we want to develop our subtle faculties in an organic way, not jump in blindfolded. The subtle body needs to be able to adjust to, or prepare for, ever more intense experiences.
There is no doubt that an induced experience of expanded consciousness can function as an eyeopener and give a taste of what's in store in the Self. However, to see the use of substances as a spiritual path in itself, is
So how do you get a congregation to encounter mysticism when they are not accustomed to it and when they assume that only Eastern religious practices can be mystical?
It is interesting that Schopenhauer uses the term "Vorstellung" which can translate to mean a mental projection or Vorstellungen mental projections.
Danke,
Thanks for your interesting comment.
I'm all for inner experience and mystery, but this too looks like dogma to me.
Which is it?
For any so interested, such similarities have been listed by a short article that was written by Huston Smith, titled "A Universal Grammar of World Religions," which has been published in several places since delivered at the Pacific School of Religion in 2005. It is also in the Appendix to Smith's autobiography "Tales of Wonder" (Harper, 2009) & retitled as "A Universal Grammar of Worldviews."
That may have started with the Catholics during the Dark Ages when they made it mandatory, to become a saint, one had to perform x number of miracles.
The esoterism of genuine traditional mysticism has primordial roots, as seen in the writings of ancient Egyptian priests (Hermes Trismiestegores, for example) and even others prior from all corners of the globe. Black Elk of the Ogalalla Sioux showed a mystical praxis that was likely known for thousands of years.
- Einstein :The Life and Times, p.275
I googled, and apparently you're referring to a book by Ronald W Clark. Then I googled Ronald W Clark. Seems he wrote a lot of biographies. (And some alternate-reality fiction, which I find hilariously appropriate to this discussion.)
Maybe Clark was a serious author and the anecdote from his book is genuine. I don't know. At this point I'm not inclined to trust any anecdotes about Einstein without researching them. I'd rather stick to things which Einstein wrote. and, as I've often said before about his writing, he was brilliant on the subject of physics and ambiguous on religious (spiritual, etc) subjects.
Again, I am not saying the quote by Fox didn't happen; I'm saying it is anomalous, and doesn't seem to have appeared before. This is why I am asking for a source, and why I want to see it in context.
Second, I wonder about the claims that there is "great wisdom...in the Western spiritual tradition" and that it is within our own culture that we should begin. I agree with both these assertions; it seems a mistake to completely reject our cultural inheritance, however misguided it may appear. But there's a leap made from "our Western tradition" to "Christian tradition." While Christianity has obviously played a huge role in the West, many of us are not Christians; Christianity is NOT our natural starting point. After all, the Western spiritual tradition is not just Christian, but an amalgam of a great many influences--Greek, Jewish, African, Indian, etc. Personally, these latter influences have been far and away the most important.
So I'm all for mysticism. But I think that what might potentially be included as part of a mystical spiritual path should be left completely wide open.
The mystic is one who seeks within what is seen without of themselves. They becomes mystics because of the integration of the external with tie internal, by eliminating the abstracts which begin with good and evil for finding everything's purpose. The mystic walks alone because they are an integrated being recognizing every attribute of earth is within them.
Therefore, the mystic doesn't claim a religion except by the definition of "the way of life which teaches one the purpose for all things." Being so they have no attachments and don't reject but recognize everything and seeks their purposes while giving entitled respect to religion, nation, ethnic, genders and sexual orientation related to man and all things to other life types.
Therefore, I would rather have seen your article entitled "Becoming Mystics" without segregating it into a religious name. It was well written otherwise, saying begin where one is and work from there into becoming the whole we can become, a mystic.
Matthew 17:20 And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.
When you consider the mass of a mustard seed and the total amount of energy stored in that mass, it makes me wonder if Jesus wasn't giving some insight into quantum physics. But then again, you can't have everybody flinging mountains around can you?
We are at a stage of mental evolution where we try to solve every problem by our rationality and this is not enough.
- Quantum Physicist Amit Goswami, PhD.
I’m far away near the bay
My skin is meshed in Sea spray.
The breeze cools my temple
With fingers quite gentle,
Encircling me round like the softness of down.
Relinquishment is my name now;
I seek to be free,
While bits and pieces erode by the Sea.
Every niche and crevice, each hollow and cave,
Enraptured, invigorated, if I be so brave.
The Sea rises swiftly; my noontide complete,
While I sit abashed, unscathed by conceit.
I take my leave quietly; my lips make no sound;
Though flushed by the trumpet,
A mystery still bound.
If mysticism can apply to all religions it is somehow transcending them all, too. If you can transcend the specifics of all religions you are in effect transcending all specific concepts of God and creator. In which case I don't think the wisdom of mysticism requires belief in God.
Although Einstein tends, from what I can tell, to fall on the agnostic side of the spectrum with regards to what is knowable, that makes him no less of an atheist. He was very clear about being an atheist.
Some kind of rough characterization of mysticism is in order here if this article is to have any real content. I would suggest, as a startting point, that what characterizes mysticism essentially is the view that the godhead is within us--perhaps within all phenomena--rather than being external and inaccesible. That seems to be the core idea; the other common features of mysticism--the shifting and multi-faceted nature of the divine, for example--would seem to more or less follow from this notion.
So Einstein is not a mystic, his ideas just have mystical characteristics. He's not reacting to any specific organized religion as mystics tend to do (no belief in God, no underpinning of organized religion), and yet he expresses a broad understanding of the manner in which scientific exploration pushes our culture as a whole away from organized religious authority. I suppose there is a "non-dualist" quality to his insistence that no individual or organized religion has an authoritative hold on how to make meaningful sense of the universe.
The above is a typical argument presented by "believers".
What I find hilarious is that many of the believers deride the scientific method and claim that it doesn't lead to "real truth", even as they try to gain credibility for their belief by mentioning science and quoting scientists (incorrectly, if necessary).
adj.
1. Having or exercising the ability to reason.
2. Of sound mind; sane.
3. Consistent with or based on reason; logical: rational behavior. See Synonyms at logical.
4. Mathematics Capable of being expressed as a quotient of integers.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rational
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When they are called irrational, it refers to (3) above. I can see why some would feel insulted if they relate it to (1) and (2).
Now, I don't know what religious experiences you are talking about, but many can be reproduced in the laboratory by electric and/or chemical stimulation of certain parts of the brain. So, while those are "real" in the sense that a person feels them, but have nothing to do with gods or spirits or any of that.
But, hey, feel free to laugh at those rational and scientifically minded. In fact, go to a major international conference on some topic in Physics, and just start rolling on the floor, laughing. :-)