God forbade...must reading!

Mysticism




   Professor Scholem explains the untying of knots of the soul means the liberation from the fetters of finitude so that they return to their origin, the Infinite One. Scholem says there are certain barriers which separate the personal existence of the soul from the stream of cosmic life…there is a dam that keeps the soul confined and protects it against the divine stream that flows all around it. What shuts up the soul in its finite personality? Sensible forms and images produce finite consciousness. They disappear in introvertive experience.



   Professor Broad says God, in the popular sense, is a person. To be a person he thinks, he feels and he wills. These states of consciousness must, as they are simultaneous, possess the unity of a single mind. In so far as they are successive, they must possess personal identity. Broad defines a person in the sense in which Tom, Dick and Harry are persons.



   Tennyson suggests the popular idea of God as a clergyman. God is a temporal being. In spite of being called unchangeable, he is angry with us today, pleased with us tomorrow. He entertains, at different times, different ideas. He makes plans for the universe in the same sense as a human makes plans for building a house. With the exception God needs no materials to work with and made the universe out of nothing.



    The only solution to the problem of the status of nirvana is that there is no solution. All attempts of the logical intellect to comprehend these mystical ultimates lead only to insoluble paradox. He who asks for a solution is unaware of the inherent paradoxicality of all mysticism. He who is dissatisfied with the negatives, “not this, not that”, and who seeks positive solution must, himself, climb beyond space and time and experience that unity. Doubtless, he will not find a solution, if by that is meant a theoretical understanding. What will he find? That is what cannot be said, but only experienced.



   Mysticism has come to be opposed to the rational and institutional aspects of religious life. It is very frequently regarded as a form of experience common to all religious traditions. It represents a level of unity in the religious apprehension of reality deeper than the merely historical and linguistic diversities between faiths.



   The ‘mystic’ is not only a potential critic, but a potential destroyer; religions with a highly developed sense of orthodoxy and its limits, of the boundaries of acceptable diversity, normally have a rich literature of ‘anti-mystical’ reaction and technique. The uncontrolled and the unpredictable elements in the vocation to this kind of holiness are both the most valuable and the most suspect of its contributions. For a religious tradition to foster and sustain the forms of non-ritual access to the sacred is for it to take a necessary and calculated, but, still quite genuine risk.





Theresa of Avila- Rowan Williams