THE EXPERIENCE OF RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
Let
us focus on the West. Our religions come one and all from the
Levant, from the Near East rather than
This leads to a totally different psychology and religious structure from
those religions in which this distinction is not made. The
goal of Western religions is not to bring about a sense of identity with the
transcendent.
Their goal is to bring about a relationship between human beings and God,
who are not the same. The typical attitude of the Levant, of
the
In
the Western tradition the divine is not within you. When you
turn within, you find a human soul and that human soul may or may not be in
proper relationship to its creator. TAT12
How
in this tradition do you get related to God? The relationship
is accomplished through an institution . This we may term the
first mythic dissociation in that it dissociates the person from the divine
principle. The individual can only become associated with the
divine through the social institution. Thus, in the Jewish
tradition, God and His people have a covenant regarding their special
relationship.
In
the Christian tradition, Christ is the center because He is true God and true
Into
how many of us has the weight described by the physicist
Erwin Schrodinger been born that
“this life of yours that you are living is not merely a piece of the entire
existence, but is, in a certain sense the whole; only the whole is not so
constituted that it can be surveyed in one simple glance.
This … is what the Brahmims express in that sacred, mystic formula that is yet
really so simple and o clear: Tat tvam asi, that is
you.” TAT13
This
is the basic insight of all
metaphysical discourse, which is immediately known – as knowable to each
alone – only when the names and forms, what I call the masks of God, have fallen
away. Yet, as many have observed, including William of Occam,
Immanuel Kant, and Henry Adams, the category, or name, or unity itself is of the
mind and may not be attributed to any supposed substance, person, or “Ground of
Being.”
One
way to deprive yourself of an experience is indeed to expect it.
Another is to have a name for it before you have an experience.
Carl Jung said that one of the functions of religion is to protect us
against the religious experience. That is because in formal
religion, it is all concretized and formulated. But, by its
nature, such an experience is one that only you can have. As
soon as you classify it with somebody else’s, it loses its character.
Ornate
and detailed religions protect us against an exploding mystical experience that
would be too much for us. TAT 14
*
There are two orders of meditation: discursive
meditation and ordered meditation. In discursive meditation,
such as that advocated by Ignatius Loyola, you consider some religious scene –
the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin or the story of the Crucifixion –
arranging it as one would a stage set in the imagination.
This is a protective prelude to one order of meditation.
Another order of meditation is explosive because it carries you beyond all
names, forms, and concepts. And then you cannot get back.
If, however, you have engaged for several years in discursive meditation
first, it serves as an intermediary state by which you can get back.
In places in which meditation has been practiced for a long time – in
contemplative orders, for example – this is well understood.
TAT14
(nativity
scene) – The many symbols, such as the animals of the Egyptian mystery religions
breathing their spirit on the infant Jesus – the bull of the god Osiris and the
ass of his brother Set, there in the manger – suggest their early understanding
that this was indeed so. So, too, in the same nativity scene,
the Magi wear the hat of Mithra as they pay homage. TAT14
(parallels)
It is clar that, in Orpheus and Christ, we have exactly the same
archetype, with the motif of leaving the pyshical world, still symbolized with a
cross in astronomy, for the spiritual. They leave the Earth,
symbol of Mother, to go to the realm of the father. TAT14
Paul
also grasped that the Christian myth of the Fall at the Tree of the Garden and
the Redemption at
When
man ate of the fruit of the Tree, he discovered himself in the field of duality
instead of the field of unity. As a result, he finds himself
out, in exile. The two cherubim placed at the gate are there
representative of the world of the pairs of opposites in which, having been case
out of the world of unity, he is now located. You are kept in
exile by your commitment to that world. TAT15
Christ
goes past that – “I and the Father are one” – back into the realm of unity from
which we have been expelled. These are mysteries.
Here is an echo and a translation into another set of images of what we
ourselves are experiencing. What comes forth now with the
grain, as particles of that one life that informs all things, is the revelation
of the spiritual unity in all its aspects. Here also
TAT15
There
are two orders of religious perspective. One is ethical,
pitting good against evil. In the biblically grounded
Christian West, the accent is on ethics, on good against evil.
We are thus bound by our religion itself to the field of duality.
The mystical perspective, however, views good and evil as aspects of one
process. One finds this in the Chinese yin-yang sign, the
dai-chi.
Remember
my earlier statement that the experien ce of mystery comes not from expecting it
but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear
and desire. Drop them and the
radiance comes.
TAT16