Troublemane
Well-Known Member
There are examples of mystics getting claimed by a particular religion who did not really belong to it. Like John the Baptist---he gets claimed by christianity by default, cuz he was in the NT.
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Can Mysticism Serve as an Alternative to Religion?
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
There are examples of mystics getting claimed by a particular religion who did not really belong to it. Like John the Baptist---he gets claimed by christianity by default, cuz he was in the NT.
doppelganger
Through the Looking Glass
Change of perspective or an awakening to or an awareness of perspective?
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
Hehe. That makes perfect sense to me, Patty.
In regards to the OP, I would have to say give an emphatic "no". The last thing this small, backwater planet needs is yet another religion. Mysticism dissolves the need for dogma.
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doppelganger
Through the Looking Glass
Not the same. There are changes in perspective that are not an awareness of perspective. The latter is subsumed in the former, but the reverse is not the case.
Storm
ThrUU the Looking Glass
For individuals, sure.
I doubt it. Mysticism is about finding out for yourself. I don't think the majority of people care that much.
Can it be said to be not a perspective, then? And then what would 'not a perspective' be to us?doppelgänger;1313404 said:
I asked you once what perspective is, and you replied that it is the way we put the bits together. I still agree with that. I think I always will.
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doppelganger
Through the Looking Glass
It can be said to be a "perspective" - one that includes its perspectiveness. A meta-perspective, if you will, but still also a perspective.
But that's different from a mere change in perspective. A person can go from being a faithful "Christian" to being a faithful "Muslim" and be wholly unaware of just what the role of their own perspective plays in the reality they create.
The meta-perspective folds into itself the awareness that the gloss I place on reality constrains what I see. One of the side effects is that I can maintain several perspectives just by tweaking the way certain symbols are used.
All A are B, but not all B are A. Yes, awareness of perspective is itself a new perspective, because we're still talking about apprehending reality through the manipulation of symbols. But not every change of perspective includes an awareness of perspective. So they are not the same.
I don't think it will happen in great numbers any time soon. I agree with most posters that people just don't care enough to even want it to happen. Then others don't really know the possibility exists because they have been taught to know God you must be mediated by a priest for example. But for the person who does want to have a direct relationship with God mysticism is not only an alternative to religion, but everything for that person. It is the way you live your life, it completely absorbs you. That's how I look at it anyway...
Excellent post!!! :clap
Metempsychosis
Reincarnation of 'Anti-religion'
Mysticism alone exists, religion does not exist.
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
and religion is for those who don't know that.
Mr Cheese
Well-Known Member
You can easily argue that mysticism and religion are inseperable...
We find this when we approach the idea that mysticism is in the mundane just as much as it is in the "special"
Here Thomas Merton discusses this theme.
....
Since the perfection of the All is in the Father, it is necessary for the All to ascend to him. Therefore, if one has knowledge, he gets what belongs to him and draws it to himself. For he who is ignorant, is deficient, and it is a great deficiency, since he lacks that which will make him perfect. Since the perfection of the All is in the Father, it is necessary for the All to ascend to him and for each one to get the things which are his. He registered them first, having prepared them to be given to those who came from him.
the Gospel of truth
It all comes back, in a sense, to the term esoteric, which has been widely misrepresented and misunderstood. The concept is a keystone of Schuons thought (and appears in the title of one of his chief stud­ies, Esoterism as Principle and as Way)., Using the symbol of a circle and its center-a formulation that Schuon also employs in his writ­ings-another leading traditionalist author, Martin Lings, has described how esoterism is actually the link between world religions:
My intelligence had never been able to accept the exclu­sivist idea that there is only one valid religion. But now it had learned and most readily accepted the truth that the great religions of the world, all of them equally Heaven-sent in accordance with the various needs of different sectors of humanity, can be graphically represented by points on the circumference of a circle, each point being connected with the center, that is, with God, by a radius. The points stand for the outward aspects of the religions, whereas each radius is the esoteric path which the religion in question offers to those who seek a direct way to God in this life, and who are capable of compliance with the demands of that way of sanctification, demands far more rigorous and exacting than those of the exoteric way of salvation.
The secret (or inner) does not negate or deny the open (or outer), which can at times even be said to surround it, contain it, protect it, albeit perhaps unwittingly. In specifically Islamic terms, the tarigah (Arabic for path or Way) does not replace the shartah (the law, the highly developed code of rules and regulations that consti­tutes Islam); both start with the same foundational guidelines. But at the same time, since the esoteric path is one where movement takes place inside the circle, its progress may not always be dis­cernible to those on the circumference.
The secret is furthermore not clandestine out of paranoia or some perverse predilection for elitist exclusivism, but because exposure and publicity always crudely compromise the message being pre­served. As with the meaning of a fairy tale, any attempt to expose the esoteric to the light of rational analysis spoils it forever, robs it of all its magical meaning: truth vanishes in a puff of smoke under such circumstances. Ripping the veil off a hidden or sacred symbol reveals nothing of the inner clarity of the representation in ques­tion, but only the naked hollowness of the vision of the viewer.
The straight path-spoken of as al-Sirat al-Mustaqfm in the fati­hah, the all-embracing opening verses of the Quran-of true Sufism thus never really strays outside the circumference of the circle; nor does it meander in and out of it. It heads steadily (and usually with great difficulty) toward the center. As with a traditional craftsman, a painter, ,or a pianist, years of training in technique are required before the seeker is allowed the grace of improvisation-usually only when the center is within reach.
This demanding or rigorous path is never easy or comfortable, nor is it egalitarian or democratic, accessible to all. It is an initiatic way, the traditionalists insist, one of direct experience which cannot be spoken of to outsiders, not because the listener should not be told about it, but because they would and could not recognize the vocab­ulary, and the very attempt to verbalize it would do far more harm than good for the cause of understanding.
Thomas Merton
We find this when we approach the idea that mysticism is in the mundane just as much as it is in the "special"
Here Thomas Merton discusses this theme.
....
Since the perfection of the All is in the Father, it is necessary for the All to ascend to him. Therefore, if one has knowledge, he gets what belongs to him and draws it to himself. For he who is ignorant, is deficient, and it is a great deficiency, since he lacks that which will make him perfect. Since the perfection of the All is in the Father, it is necessary for the All to ascend to him and for each one to get the things which are his. He registered them first, having prepared them to be given to those who came from him.
the Gospel of truth
It all comes back, in a sense, to the term esoteric, which has been widely misrepresented and misunderstood. The concept is a keystone of Schuons thought (and appears in the title of one of his chief stud­ies, Esoterism as Principle and as Way)., Using the symbol of a circle and its center-a formulation that Schuon also employs in his writ­ings-another leading traditionalist author, Martin Lings, has described how esoterism is actually the link between world religions:
My intelligence had never been able to accept the exclu­sivist idea that there is only one valid religion. But now it had learned and most readily accepted the truth that the great religions of the world, all of them equally Heaven-sent in accordance with the various needs of different sectors of humanity, can be graphically represented by points on the circumference of a circle, each point being connected with the center, that is, with God, by a radius. The points stand for the outward aspects of the religions, whereas each radius is the esoteric path which the religion in question offers to those who seek a direct way to God in this life, and who are capable of compliance with the demands of that way of sanctification, demands far more rigorous and exacting than those of the exoteric way of salvation.
The secret (or inner) does not negate or deny the open (or outer), which can at times even be said to surround it, contain it, protect it, albeit perhaps unwittingly. In specifically Islamic terms, the tarigah (Arabic for path or Way) does not replace the shartah (the law, the highly developed code of rules and regulations that consti­tutes Islam); both start with the same foundational guidelines. But at the same time, since the esoteric path is one where movement takes place inside the circle, its progress may not always be dis­cernible to those on the circumference.
The secret is furthermore not clandestine out of paranoia or some perverse predilection for elitist exclusivism, but because exposure and publicity always crudely compromise the message being pre­served. As with the meaning of a fairy tale, any attempt to expose the esoteric to the light of rational analysis spoils it forever, robs it of all its magical meaning: truth vanishes in a puff of smoke under such circumstances. Ripping the veil off a hidden or sacred symbol reveals nothing of the inner clarity of the representation in ques­tion, but only the naked hollowness of the vision of the viewer.
The straight path-spoken of as al-Sirat al-Mustaqfm in the fati­hah, the all-embracing opening verses of the Quran-of true Sufism thus never really strays outside the circumference of the circle; nor does it meander in and out of it. It heads steadily (and usually with great difficulty) toward the center. As with a traditional craftsman, a painter, ,or a pianist, years of training in technique are required before the seeker is allowed the grace of improvisation-usually only when the center is within reach.
This demanding or rigorous path is never easy or comfortable, nor is it egalitarian or democratic, accessible to all. It is an initiatic way, the traditionalists insist, one of direct experience which cannot be spoken of to outsiders, not because the listener should not be told about it, but because they would and could not recognize the vocab­ulary, and the very attempt to verbalize it would do far more harm than good for the cause of understanding.
Thomas Merton
A-ManESL
Well-Known Member
True. Religion is the shell and mysticism the kernel. The one needs the other.
Why do you write Thomas Merton in the end while also stating that Martin Lings wrote so before?
Mr Cheese
Well-Known Member
The quote is taken from a book created after Thomas Merton's death, from his notes and various articles he wrote, published and did not publish to form a book:
there are other books in the series....
Merton was one of those few enlightened beings, that managed to be in the forfront of exoteric religion
while being in the forefron of esoteric mystical circles....
We need more people like him! People that can speak to the masses and the "wise few," all at once!
I wont pretend to have read a great deal of his works, I have not, but I know he progressed through his years in his writings....
But what I have read, so far, has been really good...
...........
“First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and
trembling. We can help one another to find out the meaning of life, no
doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible
for living his own life and for ‘finding himself.’ If he persists in
shifting this responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the
meaning of his own existence.”
–Thomas Merton
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion ….
We are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest ….
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud ….
To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking ….
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
–Thomas Merton (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)</SPAN>
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Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Sure. If you tell people what mystical experience to have, most will.
Mr Cheese
Well-Known Member
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
It's probably a good idea for you to stick to only emoticons - it's less embarrassing.
Prime example, btw.
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