Is Mystical Experience the Antidote to Nihilism? EDITED
if we are going to be skeptical toward any other ideology or doctrine, we should be skeptical toward skepticism itself.
www.patheos.com/blogs/carlmccolman/2018/09/is-mystical-experience-the-antidote-to-nihilism/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Best+of+Patheos&utm_content=57
Hatred and love belong together,
and they are both destructive;
you can afford them only in private & , as a people, only so long as you are not free.
~Hannah Arendt -Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962)
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
~Hannah Arendt
“aperspectival madness” —
in other words, the feeling of radical rootlessness
or meaninglessness that can arise from a sense that every perspective (every belief-system, every ideology) is “true” only from a limited perspective.
We keep pulling back from every limited perspective, in search of a larger truth, a larger meaning-system, and we just keep falling deeper into the void: the nothingness.
Nihilism
Fundamentalists rigidly hold on to their dogmatic belief, rejecting any contrary views as “fake news.” It seems this has become the way that many seem to cope in our radically post-creedal world.
don’t turn experience
into just another
fundamentalism,
which is what I think
a lot of experience-based spirituality.
(whether charismatic Christianity, or various. new age mysticisms, or even the current mindfulness fad) does.
mysticism does
not erase the void that fundamentalism tries to escape.
mysticism accepts that very void!
mystical spirituality will not
give you an “experience”.
to cast out all doubt.
If anything, it will plunge you far deeper into nothingness than anything else has done.
All that we “know” is partial and.
filtered down into
humanized.
concepts. experience”.of God.
mysticism radically takes us beyond experience in to darkness,
into mystery,
into unknowing,
into wondering,
into doubt,
into nothingness.
Radical Christian mysticism does not shield us from doubt and nihilism.
Rather, it encourages us to embrace the silence, befriend the unknowing, enter into the doubt and the mystery, trusting that only in the radical darkness of that place beyond language, beyond concept, beyond thought and feeling — and, therefore, beyond experience — can we ever hope to encounter the living God.
B In order to deny.
every kind of idolatry.
possible, a Christian must be every kind of atheist possible.” — Denys Turner and “To believe in God is not a decision we can make. All we can do is to decide not to give our love to false Gods.” — Simone Weil
Most mystics encourage us to ignore or be non-attached to such experiences. You have an experience of God? Okay, no big deal. You’ve never had such an experience? Sure, that’s okay too.
No big deal.
...placing our hope in such experiences...
We become attached to them.
Pretty soon, the
“experience of God”
matters more to
us than God.
That’s like saying I’m more interested in sex
than in love. sex without love causes suffering.
That’s an epidemic in our society these days.
we can encounter, and befriend, and live into love in purely human terms. Even if I feel totally unloved,
I can choose to love:
be loving to others
I can choose to be a blessing to others.
He wants us to keep loving until we even can love our enemies. that’s the invitation. That’s the call.
🥁 www.khandro.com/kenwilber/bhe3.html
The primordial truth
is the ringing:
the relative truth is the
"I" and the "bell,"
the mind and the body,
the subject and the object. They have a certain relative reality, but they are not, as Eckhart would say, the final word.
Nothing you can do to the "I" or the "bell" will Make them one;
you can only relax into
the prior ringing, the immediacy of experience itself, at which point the dilemma does not arise. It is not solved, it is dissolved -
and not by reducing the subject to the object or the object to the subject, but by recognizing the primordial ground of which each is a partial reflection."
(A Brief History Of Everything, pp 231-232)
Reality is composed neither of things nor processes, neither wholes nor parts, but 🍃🌿🍃🌱🍃🌿🌾🍃whole/parts, or holons...
Consciousness is simply what depth looks like from within. As depth increases, consciousness increasingly awakens and Spirit increasingly unfolds.
Depth must be communicated, and communication must be interpreted.
Evolution always incorporates and goes beyond (transcends and includes).
Surfaces can be seen, but depth must be interpreted. The greater the depth of transcendence, the greater the burden of inclusion Worldviews (Lower Left - Lower Right): archaic - foraging magic -
horticultural mythic - agrarian rational - industrial existential -
Informational Concepts:
Aperspectival Madness -
involves the realization that all perspectives are relative; madness results from a failure to differentiate between perspectives (to acknowledge that some perspectives are relatively better than others)
When we surrender the chattering mind, we release fear and can enter into the cloud of unknowing from a place of profound faith and love. Befriend your ability to love and let it guide you, step by unknowing step, directly into the cloud of unknowing.
love is the mother of faith. 🥁
christine gomez among Christians is that they do not know the difference between "loving your enemies" and "loving evil/deceit". It is not ethical for Christians or non Christians to stand with people who are deceitful, manipulative and corrupt. I know many who stand with such deceitful people and they claim they are praying to God. This is absolute hypocrisy... When evil is encouraged within the Church, Satan is given the opportunity to grow within the Church Art Nicol: The Source of Love is gracious to tailor each of our experiences to our particular receptivities, like personalized gifts or custom-fitted apparel. All can be categorized as "mystical" and yet none need be the same. Yet, I do believe that if one surrenders more and more of one's self-centered orientation and concerns oneself increasingly with the welfare of another as if that "other" were a sister or brother in the family of God, as significant to God as anyone else and worthy of total devotion and service as if God's beloved child, then this process will bring one into ever closer approximation to oneness with the Source of Love and Life -- until ultimately God reaches across the narrow gap to touch and fill our hearts and envelope us in His/Her unconditional love permanently. As we learn what love truly is and share it with another as God's beloved, we are aligning ourselves to receive from God what we are sharing. As one loves another as if he or she is a child of God, one is loving God and becoming more and more God's channel of Love. God (Source of Love who cares for us all) will respond to and participate within that devotion. The Golden Rule will operate and some expression of "return on one's investment" in love will flow around and through as a gift. It's a permanent change of orientation, as if the Supreme Being of Love now resides within my heart and is my master as well as friend... a transformation from a dualistic orientation towards life into a nondualistic, unified one. relating to another person who needed the reassuring presence of a significant other to help overcome intense feelings of powerlessness and forsakenness, I hesitantly volunteered for this experience step by step, slip-up by slip-up, recovery by recovery, forgiveness by forgiveness, regardless of the risks I sensed were involved. as I was ready to receive it) that my ego was a false identity and that I had a true identity as a child of God who did not need to substitute the ego for it. the root of the integrity as vulnerable as a soft-shelled crab. And yet, my vulnerability empowers me to be vulnerable (available freely) to the flow of Love that God wills be ours forever as a natural consequences of remembering who we are, whose we are and whom are ours. Carl McColman It's Pascal's wager: if the Gospel is just a fiction, at least we have the joy of leading a good life here on earth. And if the Gospel is true, then we are just at the beginning of an adventure that will never end.
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