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#2557 - Friday, August 18, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
This issue continues the excerpt from Issue #2556. The writing is from a new book on nondual Christianity. It could also be called a book on nonduality based on the confessions and instruction of Jesus Christ. The author has granted permission to continue publishing selections from this book in my next few Highlights issues. This book contains gem after gem of nondual expression not only from Jesus, His disciples, and other confessors, but especially from the heart and mind of the author, Michael Roden.
--J. Katz
by Michael Roden "Look inside" at Amazon.com: http://snipurl.com/v4zp
Chapter 1 continued...
With habituation to the light found in spiritual experience,
the individual’s mind and will begin to change. Oceanic love
may be experienced: the deep, joyous, and tranquil manifestation
of a more universal will. Such emotion filling heart and mind
changes them as well, fully and by degrees. Visions may be seen
and divine revelation may be given, like a message from out of
time. There is in mystical experience a sense of joining and at
the same time of transcendence of everything except the Being
that is God. Only from Him there is no hiding. He infuses all,
for He is the eternal originator and sustainer. Inherent in the
holy encounter with Him is a strong sense of fullness that
matches the heart-deep hunger for it and a sense of having at
last surmounted usual lostness for certainty, certainty in the
sacredness of everything because of perfect holiness in God.
Simply to learn of the possibility of
internal transformation can bring great benefit to the
individual. Mystical experience gravitates to the individual who
opens to it even slightly. But to give it its practice is to
become prone to experience, to enter it more readily. This need
not be done through rituals. The process is to let fear and
guardedness fall away as the peace and purpose of being
spiritually guided settles in.
The process toward achieving experience
of this union is not exactly difficult, but it may be long and
intricate. Lex Hixon states that sensitivity to the guidance of
spirit is indirectly imparted:
Becoming sensitive to the guidance
of spirit is learned from the genuinely ecstatic members of the
community, not by rational instruction but as a child learns its
own native language. The learning process is gradual, often
imperceptible.
Training in spiritual experience makes
use of everything, from direct instruction to indirect example,
from ritual to reading to prayer, from the repetition of
religious precepts to the practice of forgiveness in the larger
world. It uses life itself. It can make use of any moment, of any
situation, as it shines its light into the mind. As Jesus said:
. . . there is nothing hid, except to be made manifest; nor
is anything secret, except to come to light (Mark 4:22).
To seek the mystical experience is to
respond to “the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”
(Phil. 3:14). It is to enter the evidence of something more real
than surface appearance, as if there were another world hidden
behind this one. To seek the mystical experience is to ask in
prayer, with Jesus, for the oneness of God. Any open mind can be
a vessel for this experience.
We live in a context of experience
always. Even in our ordinary existence we live in a context of
psychology and inner experience. Our life and our self are
internal, a series of psychological, emotional, and spiritual
experiences, states, and conditions. We define ourselves and our
relation to our world and to others from within a context of
inner experience. All our motivation, intentions, hopes, dreams,
plans, and goals are determined by what we value. The mind set
free would soar to the highest truth, the heart flow from the
deepest value. “For where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also,” says Jesus in Luke 12:34.
Internal spiritual experience is at
least as solid and certain a foundation for truth as anything
else. Even though “there is no descriptive term
comprehensive enough in meaning to express the entire content of
experience as such,” for the Christian who is guided by the
Holy Spirit of God, which connects and keeps close, not a
question would remain that need be answered. That is because the
Spirit “searches everything, even the depths of God.”
It lives in God, and through this Spirit, so do those in whom it
once was hidden.
That which remains when an individual
encounters God is pure Being, pure Is-ness, pure experience, pure
knowledge, perfect togetherness. One’s connection to the
other realm lies in such an encounter, one’s salvation
depends on it, one’s being is it. The lesser self recedes,
and an all-¬encompassing one replaces it, through an encounter
with God through the Spirit.
Laying bare the deep psychological and
spiritual elements involved in spiritual experience, Rudolf Otto
has commented on “the immediately-felt certainty, the
axiomatic quality and universality of religious conviction”
that could not be explained in normal human terms. The purpose of
religion is not to classify and categorize—and therefore
further divide—but rather, to join, to personalize and
universalize. The sense of sacred experience is that which makes
religion transcendent and therefore gives it its ultimate
purpose.
Spiritual and mystical experience lies
as much in the domain of psychology as of religion. Sometimes the
deep psychological and even spiritual component is missed by
theologians and scholars who see religion more along the
intellectual lines of philosophy or along the historical lines of
human society. Yet internal experience is where religion begins
and ends.
As Christianity became institutionalized
and organized in hierarchical fashion, its emphasis shifted
toward conformity of belief, and away from the open individuality
of spiritual experience. Historian Helmut Koester states that the
proverbial “keys of the kingdom” were originally
intended for an experientially based Christianity of individuals.
“The power of the keys was originally designed to bolster
offices which became typical of the major heresies: the prophet
in Montanism, and the teacher in Gnosticism.” The offices of
prophet and teacher were replaced with priest and bishop as
Christianity began to value secular power and bureaucracy rather
than individual experience of the sacred.
Spiritual experience is the great
equalizer of persons. It ends the illusion of separation from God
and from others. It “changes every assumption about the
purpose of human existence.” It reveals individuals to be
the same on the most fundamental psychological level, a
rock-solid foundation on which to build a house in eternal
creation.
J. G. Davies notes that there is little
evidence of gatherings for worship in earliest Christianity other
than baptism and the Eucharist or ritual of shared meal. The New
Testament indicates that early Christians met mainly to share
experience, and this could be done somewhat informally. Baptism
was more than a ritual; it was an initiation into spiritual
experience and to converted identity, and the Eucharist or Holy
Communion was the remembrance and restoration of spiritual
presence through union. Origen believed that because of their
grounding in spiritual experience, “in the life to come, the
direct vision of God will make the eucharist and the Bible, which
mediate the vision of God to us on earth, unnecessary.”
There were great internal processes at work in earliest
Christianity, interior processes passed down through tradition
and deepened by the readings, but the best way to uncover
internal processes is to experience them.
If mysticism lies at the heart of a
religion, how could religion become overwhelmingly legalistic, so
as to derive nearly all its direction from external sources?
Wilfred Cantwell Smith explains it thus:
If one’s own “religion”
is attacked, by unbelievers who necessarily conceptualize it
schematically, or all religion is, by the indifferent, one tends
to leap to the defence of what is attacked, so that presently
participants of a faith—especially those most involved in
argument—are using the term in the same externalist and
theoretical sense as are their opponents.
Not that theology is inherently bad, but
Smith contends that a religion becomes external to the individual
when one is defending it against those perceived to be outside
it. Human defensiveness and rationalization concretize religion
into a thing among things, outside the self, though it began as
an affiliation of mind and heart with soul. But externalized
religion becomes schematized, whereupon it begins to tend to
personalized interests such as self-perpetuation, rather than the
good of all humankind, thus neglecting the heart.
Smith goes on to describe the process of
the externalization of the Christian religion, saying that
Christian discussion began to center:
not on transcendent realities, and
not on faith, man’s relation to them, but on the
conceptualization of both, and on man’s relation to those
conceptualizations: on believing.
Dogma—systematized teaching—comes
from the conceptualization and concretization of constant
transcendent realities. The mind limited strictly to intellect
can avoid the real subject for what seems like forever. And when
the mind seeks to defend itself with intellectual propositions
and moral proclamations, it is difficult for the Spirit,
pervasive as it is, to break through. The individual becomes
ensnared in the thicket of his or her own system. Intellectual
assent to beliefs and teachings may come to take the place of the
presence inherent in spiritual experience. But intellectual
assent to the propositions of the intellect does not tend to the
integration of the self both within itself and interpersonally
with others as spiritual experience does.
Paul offers spiritual experience as the
sine qua non, as the essential characteristic of the Christian:
“Any one who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not
belong to him” (Rom. 8:9).
Experience in the Spirit is the great
transformation hidden in the heart of Christianity. Paul tells
his spiritual brethren that “you are not in the flesh, you
are in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you”
(Rom. 8:9). In other words, one belongs to another order of Being
when the otherworldly Spirit overwhelms heart and mind.
Risking externalization then, how is
mysticism to be defined? It is the quest for Being. To take
refuge in God through Union with God is that which the mystical
heart seeks beyond all else. In mysticism, the presence of the
Lord abides within the individual, and can therefore be
experienced in the surrender of everything else. (It is more
precisely true that the experience experiences itself; not even
the individual is mediator of this experience.) In mysticism, the
Church in all its splendor and the Bible in all its glory are
ultimately signposts to the true glory and splendor inherent in
union with God.
The highest, deepest mysticism always
involves a realization of union with God. Mystics as individuals
choose no longer to experience themselves as separate from God;
they strive above all else to bridge the sense of distance
between themselves and God. Their drive becomes to find the
highest state of Being and to remain there. Paul speaks of this
universal motivation and its resolution in experience in God:
that they should seek God, in the
hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not
far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and
have our being” (Acts 17:27–28).
According to the great Christian mystic
Meister Eckhart, the mystic longs to be nearer to God than he is
to himself: “My being depends on God’s intimate
presence.” The mystic wants above all else to be with God.
How better to do so than to give oneself to Him in communion and
find in Him the holiest of homes?
Andrew Louth speaks of the passionate
significance of union with God to the mystic:
The mystic is not content to know
about God, he longs for union with God. “Union with God”
can mean different things, from literal identity, where the
mystic loses all sense of himself and is absorbed into God, to
the union that is experienced as the consummation of love in
which the lover and the beloved remain intensely aware both of
themselves and of the other.
God reveals Himself through the deepest
parts of the soul, mind, and heart to the one who can search only
for Him. In the completion of true encounter, the self is for a
second erased and for days left changed in the experience of
union with God.
Mysticism speaks of a relationship with
God that goes beyond self yet remains within oneself. Not only is
there a subjective world within, but there is an objective world
beneath that, a world of truth and certainty, a world of
transcendent knowledge and all-encompassing love. There is, at
the very base of the subjective mind, something eternally real
and true, spoken of in religious terms as Spirit, as union with
God, as the kingdom of God, as eternal life.
Some forms of mysticism emphasize the
heart of devotion or of helping service, and some emphasize the
intellect put to new use as steward of the spirit. The way of
action, or service to others, is important and personally
fulfilling; through service to others, we help ourselves. Lofty
transcendent ideas are not only interesting for the mind to
contemplate, but can also lead to a lofty state of transcendence.
Yet what matters most is not the particular emphasis, for in
truth all forms work together, so that each contains at least a
kernel of the others. What matters most is union with God. The
mystical heart wants deeply to feel this, the mystical mind, to
know it.
Mysticism depends on the evidence of
objective internal experience. Systems that may grow from this
life-giving clarity cannot replace it, so care must be taken that
they do not overgrow it. In mysticism, there is an inner reality
that seems more real to the deeper mind and heart than does the
external world. Mysticism reveals evidence of the
interconnectedness behind the multiplicity of which the world
seems made. It is as if multiplicity, for all its ever-sprawling
array, is just a surface that hides the core truth of Being. The
individual will never be deeply and personally satisfied with
even hundreds of thousands of things as long as his or her inner
heart, will, and mind crave only one.
~ ~ ~
by Michael Roden "Look inside" at Amazon.com: http://snipurl.com/v4zp