Concerning the reality we shall experience after we die, humanity has two predominant projections. It seems to me that both are based on actual experiences of individuals later further elaborated by speculators who haven’t been there. I call the first ecstatic, the other communitarian. Both appear in variant cultural frames. In the Buddhist tradition nirvana is a kind of pure bliss about which I can’t find any elaboration; in the west it is union with God or the beatific vision. Both appear to me to be passive states; but those who hold this view (or have experienced it) deny that. They report a union, an identity, a fullness, a completeness, an unlimited power, an all encompassing knowledge. For a detailed rendition of such an experience I’d point to that of Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s given in Pathways Through to Space. This work has an eastern, Hindu flavor; its merit is that it comes from a modern twentieth century American who’s trying to communicate it in a framework accessible to us. Anyone genuinely interested in the matters discussed in Borderzone will get something valuable out of reading that book. The iconic and briefest summary is Meister Eckhart’s famous line: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” The same sort of unitary experience is reported of Plotinus and is found in Islamic mysticism too. I cannot help but think that experiences of this type—very powerful that they are—have shaped humanity’s theologies in major ways. It seems to me that Plotinus’ own unitive experience must have been the basis of his cosmic conceptualization of the One. And ideas like omnipotence and omniscience are mirrored in the experiences of ecstatics—Merrell-Wolff’s for instance or those of Mansur Al-Hallaj, the Persian-Muslim mystic martyred for proclaiming “I am the Truth,” and “There is nothing in my cloak but God.”
I’ve had a minor but potent youthful experience of this type myself (reported here). That should have made me lean in this directions, but, instead, I’ve come to think of it as a valuable inoculation against this view of reality. In all reports of this type of experience I recognize my own—and I’m grateful for the experience because I have a personal basis for evaluating others’. Mine took place spontaneously rather than in the context of passionate struggling, questing, and willful attempts at realizing the transcending—as is usually the case. Thus I see the phenomenon of ecstasy as perhaps caused by a certain state of concentration which releases energies we only experience very, very filtered in ordinary life. And it is an experience of energy rather than of transcending will or intelligence; the cognitive or willful aspects of that experience come from our own consciousness not from that which temporarily envelops us. For these reasons, over a lifetime, I’ve been much more inclined toward the other major human projection of the Beyond.
That projection envisions communities of vast size and diversity in immaterial or “other-material” spaces somewhere invisible to us from here. The simplest expression of this projection might be the “Happy Hunting Grounds” said to have been the destination of some Indian tribes. (With hundreds of real tribes, every human ideology has been presented in Indian lore, not least straight-forward materialism.) The most elaborate such projection I know of is Swedenborg’s, divided into three realms: a lower hellish, a middling spiritual transitional world, and an upper heavenly. Swedenborg’s has a biblical flavor, but missing is the redemptive role of Jesus of Nazareth. People have read similar structures into the Koran. This view also has a strong basis in Near Death Experience reports which picture the earliest moments of entering such communities. Heaven and hell are also part of the Christian world conception—suggesting that it makes room for both, a unitive beatific vision and a “life” in heaven or hell. One is for the upper, let us say, and the other for the less educated classes. And in Buddhism, of course, we also find, perhaps also just for the lower classes, all manner of splendid heavens and dreadful hells, usually numbered seven, a number humanity genuinely likes.
To be sure, the unitive/ecstatic projection is much simpler, tempting the intellectual mind to reach for Ockham’s razor. But Ockham intended for the simplest theory accommodating all of the evidence. I’m much more drawn to the “naive” view of the masses of humanity—which, in the East, for instance, lifted Mahayana Buddhism, with its grand heavens and deep hells, into the most populous branch of that religions—even if, one imagines, it is altogether incompatible with the Buddha’s own view or experiences. If we take the unitive experience as the ballgame, one person in multiple millions born will be saved, the rest plowed under once again. And the vast cosmos of stars and galaxies has no meaning whatsoever. For once I find myself with the masses and look at the elites with a very puzzled face.
Showing posts with label Eckhart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eckhart. Show all posts
Monday, September 6, 2010
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Mystical Experiences: An Elaboration
The questions I’ve always asked myself about the mystical experience are these: What is it that mystics experience? Is it God? Or could it be something else extraordinarily energetic? Here I hasten to introduce qualifiers. I’m not in any doubt, myself, that God is ultimately the source of everything. But in the mystical experience, the claim is not that people experience some higher or more energetic order. It is that they have experienced, if only briefly, union with God. To illustrate this:
The Sufi mystic Al Hallaj (858-922) once said, “I am the Truth”; that statement cost him his life. Meister Eckhart (quoted in the last post) identified his eye with God’s—ambiguously enough, to be sure, to escape drastic censure. Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), another mystic, wrote in a poem: “I know God cannot live one instant without Me:/If I should come to naught, needs must He cease to be.” My modern example, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, said the exactly same sorts of things, especially in Chapter VI of his Pathways Through to Space but also sprinkled throughout his book elsewhere. Merrell-Wolff was a modern, wrote in the modern manner, and we understand from him that he fully understood the difference between his limited self and what he called the SELF. So also did, I have no doubt, Al Hallaj, Eckhart, and Silesius. But what they felt was a powerful identity with this higher something in their moments of exaltation—and identified it with the Absolute.
Other characteristics common to this experience are feelings of power and exaltation. The person feels all-knowing. The self seems vast and limitless. Everything seems mysteriously present in the experience—and is also known and understood. And over against that exalted feeling, ordinary life appears to be a mere illusion, nothing, shards, and insubstantiality.
But when the experience is over, the powers felt and the insights temporarily possessed seem to depart again. Nothing new is left over. The experience is most definitely energetic. Franklin called it a “current of bliss” and, in his description, even used electrical analogies. Bruno Gröning (1906-1959), a German faith-healer, spoke about the Heilstrom, the healing current. My own limited experience was also an unmistakeable perception of a powerful but benign vibration, of life and of vitality. It brought the very concrete I walked upon to life.
Now it strikes me that all of the people who have such experiences—except the few who experience them spontaneously—engage in inward practices like prayer and meditation, usually coupled with self-disciplines the aim of which is to shut out distractions, including those produced by the body itself. They are quite willfully seeking some internal origin. When the Buddha sat down under the bodhi tree just before his own personal breakthrough, he was determined to remain there until it happened. To be sure, the onset of the experience happens when it does. It can’t be forced. Sometimes it coincides with the effort. Often—as many Zen stories illustrate—something quite irrelevant triggers the satori. But effort is present in the context. A preparation is present. The focus, the personal viewpoint, has changed. And very often, these practices are also undertaken in a religious context. It is not therefore surprising that the experience itself should be explained in a religious way. The mystic is assaulting heaven—and the gates open! Overwhelming grace descends.
Long years of pondering this subject has gradually convinced me that the mystical experience is probably a temporary exposure to the life force—which, in my thought, originates in God. But I think of this concentrated and all-knowing energy as the creating impulse itself, not its culmination. By contrast with it the individual feels that ordinary reality, as we perceive it, is just ashes and cinder, but as I parse this complex of experience, it seems to me that the Creator intends the world to be—and to be what it is—a fantastic elaboration all of which, when you force your way back to the upwelling point of this energy, is still all fused into a single unity.
To put this in more mechanical terms, the aim of creation is precisely what we see around and beyond us, namely the vast societies of life, the churches militant, suffering, and triumphant. The vector of this great energy is in the direction of complexity, not fusion. Opening ourselves to the grace that flows is definitely desirable, but when it flows so potently as to disable us, we may have gone too far.
In this context, time and again, I’m reminded of the Sufi differentiation between those who do and those who do not have the option, as Idris Shah once put it in one of his books. What does this saying mean? To me it means that genuine spiritual achievement is to cultivate our ability to choose. In a great storm of any kind—not least one of vital energy—we have no option. For this reason Sufi sheiks did not approve of ecstatic experiences, thinking that those who underwent them were insufficiently trained. The real unveiling, when it happens, is something else. You retain the option.
The Sufi mystic Al Hallaj (858-922) once said, “I am the Truth”; that statement cost him his life. Meister Eckhart (quoted in the last post) identified his eye with God’s—ambiguously enough, to be sure, to escape drastic censure. Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), another mystic, wrote in a poem: “I know God cannot live one instant without Me:/If I should come to naught, needs must He cease to be.” My modern example, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, said the exactly same sorts of things, especially in Chapter VI of his Pathways Through to Space but also sprinkled throughout his book elsewhere. Merrell-Wolff was a modern, wrote in the modern manner, and we understand from him that he fully understood the difference between his limited self and what he called the SELF. So also did, I have no doubt, Al Hallaj, Eckhart, and Silesius. But what they felt was a powerful identity with this higher something in their moments of exaltation—and identified it with the Absolute.
Other characteristics common to this experience are feelings of power and exaltation. The person feels all-knowing. The self seems vast and limitless. Everything seems mysteriously present in the experience—and is also known and understood. And over against that exalted feeling, ordinary life appears to be a mere illusion, nothing, shards, and insubstantiality.
But when the experience is over, the powers felt and the insights temporarily possessed seem to depart again. Nothing new is left over. The experience is most definitely energetic. Franklin called it a “current of bliss” and, in his description, even used electrical analogies. Bruno Gröning (1906-1959), a German faith-healer, spoke about the Heilstrom, the healing current. My own limited experience was also an unmistakeable perception of a powerful but benign vibration, of life and of vitality. It brought the very concrete I walked upon to life.
Now it strikes me that all of the people who have such experiences—except the few who experience them spontaneously—engage in inward practices like prayer and meditation, usually coupled with self-disciplines the aim of which is to shut out distractions, including those produced by the body itself. They are quite willfully seeking some internal origin. When the Buddha sat down under the bodhi tree just before his own personal breakthrough, he was determined to remain there until it happened. To be sure, the onset of the experience happens when it does. It can’t be forced. Sometimes it coincides with the effort. Often—as many Zen stories illustrate—something quite irrelevant triggers the satori. But effort is present in the context. A preparation is present. The focus, the personal viewpoint, has changed. And very often, these practices are also undertaken in a religious context. It is not therefore surprising that the experience itself should be explained in a religious way. The mystic is assaulting heaven—and the gates open! Overwhelming grace descends.
Long years of pondering this subject has gradually convinced me that the mystical experience is probably a temporary exposure to the life force—which, in my thought, originates in God. But I think of this concentrated and all-knowing energy as the creating impulse itself, not its culmination. By contrast with it the individual feels that ordinary reality, as we perceive it, is just ashes and cinder, but as I parse this complex of experience, it seems to me that the Creator intends the world to be—and to be what it is—a fantastic elaboration all of which, when you force your way back to the upwelling point of this energy, is still all fused into a single unity.
To put this in more mechanical terms, the aim of creation is precisely what we see around and beyond us, namely the vast societies of life, the churches militant, suffering, and triumphant. The vector of this great energy is in the direction of complexity, not fusion. Opening ourselves to the grace that flows is definitely desirable, but when it flows so potently as to disable us, we may have gone too far.
In this context, time and again, I’m reminded of the Sufi differentiation between those who do and those who do not have the option, as Idris Shah once put it in one of his books. What does this saying mean? To me it means that genuine spiritual achievement is to cultivate our ability to choose. In a great storm of any kind—not least one of vital energy—we have no option. For this reason Sufi sheiks did not approve of ecstatic experiences, thinking that those who underwent them were insufficiently trained. The real unveiling, when it happens, is something else. You retain the option.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Mystical Experiences
The Experience and Its Content
Genuine mystical experiences are all in some ways ecstatic. The word ecstasy comes from Greek roots for “outside” and for “stand,” thus meaning to “stand outside” of oneself, to be taken out of oneself. These states have a passive character in that the subject of the experience has no choice in the matter. Not that he or she wants to have a choice. The experience is joyous. But the ability to resist it isn’t there. You’re falling, and there is no way to arrest a fall.
When I was around seventeen, I once went off to a choir practice in the evening. A ten-block walk lay ahead. At the time I lacked even change enough to take the streetcar. I left on foot because I’d promised to attend. It was almost dark. As I was walking along, such an event unfolded. It came on without any discernible trigger; my state of mind was calm, indifferent, indeed even a little sour. I didn’t really want to go. I was only going to honor a commitment. Nothing changed outwardly, but my perception of reality underwent a drastic change. Energy seemed to flow from everything around me. Trees, bushes, houses, the concrete sidewalk, the black street surface, everything glowed, vibrated, seemed in motion. The effect was immediate and intensely emotional. Within seconds I crying—crying tears of joy. Later, trying to find a way to link the experience to something, anything, that I had seen before, I thought of some of Van Gough’s painting in which the scenes appear to tremble, to be on fire. The principal feeling I had was that “everything’s alive,” and this realization, at that time, made me feel joyous. The feeling lasted for about as long as it takes to walk the length of a city block. After that the feeling faded.
Compared to other accounts that I have read, mine was a relatively mild experience—but for me the strangest and most unusual event of my life. I was a convinced atheist at the time, and, indeed, I continued in those convictions for several more years. You don’t have to be a narrow-gauged materialist to be an atheist. More pronounced experiences of this kind, “stronger versions,” you might say, have a distinctly noetic quality, a strong sense of knowledge is present. Something of that was also present in my feelings, but not as pronounced as in others’, a feeling of exaltation and sense of knowledge. People in these states feel that they finally understand everything; they have the sense of having penetrated the deepest secrets of the universe.
Over time I’ve become convinced that the noetic quality of these experiences is more feeling than knowledge. There is a real difference between feeling that you know and actual knowing. When something is on the tip of my tongue, it isn’t knowledge yet. And in the case of mystics, whatever it is, it stays on the tip of the tongue. Real knowledge leaves something behind, something tangibly graspable. Published accounts or philosophical works of people with the mystical experience, sometimes called the unitive experience, don’t really have content beyond the sort of empty symbolic knowledge we get from mathematics. By way of example I would point to Plotinus’ Enneads in the Graeco-Roman era, the writings of Meister Eckhart in the medieval, and the books of Franklin Merrell-Wolff in the twentieth century. Merrell-Wolff’s works are of great interest precisely because they are modern and more accessible for that reason. In Pathways Through to Space he describes his actual experiences; in The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object he attempts to build an interpretation of his experiences. Anyone hoping to discover in the second work something genuinely interesting about any world that side of the borderzone may as well abandon all hope now. Ain’t nothing there. Or, to put it more charitably, we get the essence in the title: “consciousness without an object” is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. The ultimate content of the Enneads is in a way similar: There is the One. From the One we have Intellect and Soul. This trinity defines Reality. Meister Eckhart’s famous saying: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me,” delivered in one of his sermons, is similar in its ambiguity and inscrutability to most other pronouncements that come from the mystical experience.
To sum up my take on the reports of “unitive” mystics, they rather resemble something analogous to men reporting, after seeing the ocean, that they have seem something awesome and grand, overwhelming, majestic, and beyond the horizon—and never mention water, salt, wind, waves, sand, shorelines, surf, shells, seagulls, or flying fish either.
My own experience, mild although it was, had the same character: powerful feelings, deeply memorable, but containing no meaning beyond a sense of transcending energy everywhere. Everything’s alive. The energetic quality of these experiences is even more tangibly described in Merrell-Wolff’s account. He speaks of a “current” that he clearly felt flowing at times when he had his experience. I sometimes have the feeling that concepts like grace and its Muslim version, baraka—and theories based on emanation—are possibly based on experiences of this sort.
A Personal Point of View
My object to his point should not be misinterpreted. I’m not in the least dismissive of the experience of enlightenment, as it is often called, reported by towering figures like Plotinus, Buddha, Eckhart, or our own Merrell-Wolff. I simply have a point of view which, in its own way, may have some merit.
My view is that our world is very intricately woven, first of all, not merely the life processes built up of stupendous cells—each of which is at least like a major city—but also the elemental world as a whole—many constituents of which have had to be fashioned in the wombs of two different suns in sequence (at least as currently held). Human fate, relationships of love and kinship, memory, pain and suffering, creative life, history, society, and endlessly more—all this shows a picture of tremendous value and complexity the simple dismissal of which as illusion, or as the thinning out of a denser reality, strikes me as of necessity inaccurate at minimum.
I’ve written extensive about life as a vector pointing at something. Consciousness, which seems to have been hard won by a process lasting eons, I take to be a marker of a boundary between dimensions. Its character as a boundary is further substantiated not, I emphasize, by unitary states that point to a kind of dissolving unity with overwhelming Power but, rather, by the much more messy experiences of those who partially touched the neighboring dimension. Let me call them modern shamans: the healers, the psychics, the people who exhibit paranormal gifts. Of these people Swedenborg produced the most coherent reports; here I ignore his work in biblical exegesis, which was his way of trying to make sense of things. The proof of his writings comes indirectly in the form of his paranormal experiences to which very “sound” contemporaries attested. (Kant, for example, had a friend of his gather the evidence.) These “shamans” are messy. Weeds of madness sprout everywhere around them. One concerns oneself with people like this at the risk of one’s own respectability. Yes, people like Swedenborg—who had a distinguished record as a natural scientist—but also people like Edgar Cayce, idiot savants, and other strangelings of the same sort. Carl Jung spent time on that border too. These cases are of great interest precisely because they are messy (like Reality). They indicate transcendence and they do produce a certain minimum content.
It does not surprise me at all that (a) scientists and other respectable thinkers keep their distance, (b) that the Church handles these cases with exceeding caution—after all the Church must guard its respectability too; and (c) that some few perfectly sane people of great curiosity do go there; these are people like me who have nothing to lose.
Yes, there is a real frontier. Unitary visions belong here too but not by any means as the final word on the subject but as transitions toward a better understanding. What little content seeps through the cracks, coming from the shamans, indicates a much richer reality “beyond,” at least as rich as our ordinary cosmos, including vast and coherent societies, environments with similar but yet different laws, etc., of which Swedenborg’s heaven and hell are examples as prepared for the masses of his time; his madness-riddled diaries are the messy raw material. The Taoist tales and Shiite religious accounts belong to this hidden Library of Alexandria.
My own conviction—which I’ll elaborate more later—is that ecstatic and so-called mystical experiences are contact with the lifestream as it rises into this, not as it passes into the next dimension. But to develop that argument I need more space, and this post has become rather long.
Genuine mystical experiences are all in some ways ecstatic. The word ecstasy comes from Greek roots for “outside” and for “stand,” thus meaning to “stand outside” of oneself, to be taken out of oneself. These states have a passive character in that the subject of the experience has no choice in the matter. Not that he or she wants to have a choice. The experience is joyous. But the ability to resist it isn’t there. You’re falling, and there is no way to arrest a fall.
When I was around seventeen, I once went off to a choir practice in the evening. A ten-block walk lay ahead. At the time I lacked even change enough to take the streetcar. I left on foot because I’d promised to attend. It was almost dark. As I was walking along, such an event unfolded. It came on without any discernible trigger; my state of mind was calm, indifferent, indeed even a little sour. I didn’t really want to go. I was only going to honor a commitment. Nothing changed outwardly, but my perception of reality underwent a drastic change. Energy seemed to flow from everything around me. Trees, bushes, houses, the concrete sidewalk, the black street surface, everything glowed, vibrated, seemed in motion. The effect was immediate and intensely emotional. Within seconds I crying—crying tears of joy. Later, trying to find a way to link the experience to something, anything, that I had seen before, I thought of some of Van Gough’s painting in which the scenes appear to tremble, to be on fire. The principal feeling I had was that “everything’s alive,” and this realization, at that time, made me feel joyous. The feeling lasted for about as long as it takes to walk the length of a city block. After that the feeling faded.
Compared to other accounts that I have read, mine was a relatively mild experience—but for me the strangest and most unusual event of my life. I was a convinced atheist at the time, and, indeed, I continued in those convictions for several more years. You don’t have to be a narrow-gauged materialist to be an atheist. More pronounced experiences of this kind, “stronger versions,” you might say, have a distinctly noetic quality, a strong sense of knowledge is present. Something of that was also present in my feelings, but not as pronounced as in others’, a feeling of exaltation and sense of knowledge. People in these states feel that they finally understand everything; they have the sense of having penetrated the deepest secrets of the universe.
Over time I’ve become convinced that the noetic quality of these experiences is more feeling than knowledge. There is a real difference between feeling that you know and actual knowing. When something is on the tip of my tongue, it isn’t knowledge yet. And in the case of mystics, whatever it is, it stays on the tip of the tongue. Real knowledge leaves something behind, something tangibly graspable. Published accounts or philosophical works of people with the mystical experience, sometimes called the unitive experience, don’t really have content beyond the sort of empty symbolic knowledge we get from mathematics. By way of example I would point to Plotinus’ Enneads in the Graeco-Roman era, the writings of Meister Eckhart in the medieval, and the books of Franklin Merrell-Wolff in the twentieth century. Merrell-Wolff’s works are of great interest precisely because they are modern and more accessible for that reason. In Pathways Through to Space he describes his actual experiences; in The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object he attempts to build an interpretation of his experiences. Anyone hoping to discover in the second work something genuinely interesting about any world that side of the borderzone may as well abandon all hope now. Ain’t nothing there. Or, to put it more charitably, we get the essence in the title: “consciousness without an object” is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. The ultimate content of the Enneads is in a way similar: There is the One. From the One we have Intellect and Soul. This trinity defines Reality. Meister Eckhart’s famous saying: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me,” delivered in one of his sermons, is similar in its ambiguity and inscrutability to most other pronouncements that come from the mystical experience.
To sum up my take on the reports of “unitive” mystics, they rather resemble something analogous to men reporting, after seeing the ocean, that they have seem something awesome and grand, overwhelming, majestic, and beyond the horizon—and never mention water, salt, wind, waves, sand, shorelines, surf, shells, seagulls, or flying fish either.
My own experience, mild although it was, had the same character: powerful feelings, deeply memorable, but containing no meaning beyond a sense of transcending energy everywhere. Everything’s alive. The energetic quality of these experiences is even more tangibly described in Merrell-Wolff’s account. He speaks of a “current” that he clearly felt flowing at times when he had his experience. I sometimes have the feeling that concepts like grace and its Muslim version, baraka—and theories based on emanation—are possibly based on experiences of this sort.
A Personal Point of View
My object to his point should not be misinterpreted. I’m not in the least dismissive of the experience of enlightenment, as it is often called, reported by towering figures like Plotinus, Buddha, Eckhart, or our own Merrell-Wolff. I simply have a point of view which, in its own way, may have some merit.
My view is that our world is very intricately woven, first of all, not merely the life processes built up of stupendous cells—each of which is at least like a major city—but also the elemental world as a whole—many constituents of which have had to be fashioned in the wombs of two different suns in sequence (at least as currently held). Human fate, relationships of love and kinship, memory, pain and suffering, creative life, history, society, and endlessly more—all this shows a picture of tremendous value and complexity the simple dismissal of which as illusion, or as the thinning out of a denser reality, strikes me as of necessity inaccurate at minimum.
I’ve written extensive about life as a vector pointing at something. Consciousness, which seems to have been hard won by a process lasting eons, I take to be a marker of a boundary between dimensions. Its character as a boundary is further substantiated not, I emphasize, by unitary states that point to a kind of dissolving unity with overwhelming Power but, rather, by the much more messy experiences of those who partially touched the neighboring dimension. Let me call them modern shamans: the healers, the psychics, the people who exhibit paranormal gifts. Of these people Swedenborg produced the most coherent reports; here I ignore his work in biblical exegesis, which was his way of trying to make sense of things. The proof of his writings comes indirectly in the form of his paranormal experiences to which very “sound” contemporaries attested. (Kant, for example, had a friend of his gather the evidence.) These “shamans” are messy. Weeds of madness sprout everywhere around them. One concerns oneself with people like this at the risk of one’s own respectability. Yes, people like Swedenborg—who had a distinguished record as a natural scientist—but also people like Edgar Cayce, idiot savants, and other strangelings of the same sort. Carl Jung spent time on that border too. These cases are of great interest precisely because they are messy (like Reality). They indicate transcendence and they do produce a certain minimum content.
It does not surprise me at all that (a) scientists and other respectable thinkers keep their distance, (b) that the Church handles these cases with exceeding caution—after all the Church must guard its respectability too; and (c) that some few perfectly sane people of great curiosity do go there; these are people like me who have nothing to lose.
Yes, there is a real frontier. Unitary visions belong here too but not by any means as the final word on the subject but as transitions toward a better understanding. What little content seeps through the cracks, coming from the shamans, indicates a much richer reality “beyond,” at least as rich as our ordinary cosmos, including vast and coherent societies, environments with similar but yet different laws, etc., of which Swedenborg’s heaven and hell are examples as prepared for the masses of his time; his madness-riddled diaries are the messy raw material. The Taoist tales and Shiite religious accounts belong to this hidden Library of Alexandria.
My own conviction—which I’ll elaborate more later—is that ecstatic and so-called mystical experiences are contact with the lifestream as it rises into this, not as it passes into the next dimension. But to develop that argument I need more space, and this post has become rather long.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)