Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2561 - Tuesday, August 22, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
This issue concludes the excerpt from A Church Not Made with Hands, by Michael Roden. This is a book on the teaching of nonduality from the viewpoint of Jesus Christ and His disciples, as presented by Michael Roden.
This excerpt speaks more to mystical experience than nondual being, and that's not a nondually correct thing to spend much time on. However, even today's most hip, integrated, aware writings on nonduality will seem out of date in the near future, though still bearing authority.
About eight years ago when the world of online nonduality forums started, "nonduality" was a term used in academic or ashramic contexts. When everyday people were asked, "What is nonduality?" they took the question seriously.
But things have changed. The term "nonduality" is now widely known among people drawn to the core of spirituality. So nowadays it's like, why even bother trying to talk about nonduality? If nothing is separate, how can a bridge of words be constructed? From where to where? The eye cannot see itself. People have "become" walking definitions of nonduality. T
hings change but authority remains. Here is a rendering by Michael Roden on how nonduality was spoken about in the time of Jesus. --Jerry
by Michael Roden "Look inside" at Amazon.com: http://snipurl.com/v4zp
Mystical experience is reached through the
gradual transcendence of that which hides underlying union. The
mystical process generally proceeds from purification (the
overcoming of self-interest), through illumination (encounter
with God), and finally to union (sharing the Being of God).
Mysticism sees no self separate from God. It is concerned wholly
with the more ultimate reality within Self at one with others and
God. It arrives with a new concept-free, definition-defying
identity and purpose in God.
Therefore, with mystical experience
comes a sense of liberation, of having escaped from a transitory,
limiting reality. Time no longer seems like bondage, ending in
death. Time, in fact, begins to take on the quality of eternity.
The world opens to a new Earth illumined by the internal sun of
Heaven.
Mystical individuals of all traditions
share something, not because they believe the same doctrines
(though they do end up with doctrines that point in a similar
direction), but because they share and experience the same
Spirit. The objectivity within their subjectivity transcends all
particular subjectivity and even individuality. They share a
longing for reunion with God, and the spiritual means to attain
it.
Spiritual experience is the great
equalizer, allowing young and old alike to experience the perfect
serenity of perfect oneness in innocence. The mystic takes to
heart what Joel prophesied (and what Peter repeated in Acts 2:14–18):
And it shall come to pass afterward,
that I will pour my spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters
will prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young
men shall see visions. Even upon the menservants and maidservants
in those days, I will pour out my spirit (Joel 2:28–29).
For the mystic, revelation is not
entirely of a bygone era. The prophets spoke of this eternal
outpouring. The Spirit flows freely, where it wills. The purpose
of all revelation is to illuminate the present, transcending time
to resume the Self in the present where God is.
Christianity gains richness with a
renewed emphasis on spiritual experience. Its roots are deeper
and more universal than often thought. It offers a vital
experience along with its doctrines, rituals, and systems. Were
there no great experience at the heart of Christianity, God would
be only a concept or a system of concepts handed down through the
generations. Mysticism reveals the life in God and in the holy
Self He created. For the mystic, such life is shared through
experience: “O taste and see that the Lord is good! Happy is
the man who takes refuge in him!” (Ps. 34:8)
Mystical experience offers radical
change in the here and now. Heaven is more tangible, Earth more
tranquil. What could be more real than moments spent in union
with God? Whom God fills, He fills completely, with knowledge of
primordial equality. God and world are transposed, so that now
God is first, and the world reposed. All that is, rests in God.
There is a spontaneous rejoicing. “Happy is the man who
takes refuge in him!”
Mysticism places experience of God at
the center of the self, and so also at the center of all worship
and of every doctrine. Highest mysticism adheres to one
fundamental truth, that the experience of God, being possible,
should imbue all things with its holy light. Experience should be
shined in every corner, like turning on a light. Jesus said:
Is a lamp brought in to be put under
a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand? For there is
nothing hid, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret,
except to come to light (Mark 4:21–22).
Spiritual experience casts new light on
the world, and renders vision otherworldly. The world is saved by
being made holy through spiritual vision. It is the same world,
now shined through with the light of God. The world shines with
God, when His Spirit enlightens the eye of the heart.
Christianity, like mysticism, begins
with the inner individual and ends when that individual is
returned to Oneness. No one can really mediate this for a person.
No particular group can claim exclusiveness on Oneness. It must
be an individual and profoundly personal experience, and yet it
rises well beyond any sense of separate self.
There is one spiritual reality, given
many names. Nothing else approaches the experience of the Oneness
of all being in God. All things are gathered within it. To
experience God is to experience a new sense of Being in God. The
sense of separation is succeeded by the Self at one with all
things through God.
Psychology and Spiritual Experience
Mysticism has always played a
small but deep part in Christian tradition. In earliest
Christianity and its texts, it is indeed plentiful, as we shall
see. It has enriched the religion because it has taken hold of
individuals who found the Spirit of God within themselves. For
such mystical individuals escaping the constraints of dogma and
even creaturehood down through the centuries, mystical or
spiritual experience was the inspiration behind the highest and
deepest traditions of their religion.
Yet mysticism does not stop at
tradition. The mystical individual knows that spiritual
experience cannot be contained. Tradition might help to evoke it,
but tradition is also prone to cover it. Tradition carries the
seed, but the full flowering is always “hidden” or
inherent within the individual, yet beyond the individual. It is
immanent yet transcendent, personal yet universal.
I have mentioned the psychological
nature of the spiritual experience. There is more than hope, and
more than what generally passes for faith, in the mystical
experience. There is a sense of knowing when one participates
fully in what is known by the unlimited mind. The mind limited to
conceptualization finds intellectual aspects of a religion easier
to grasp than the experiential, but the experiential aspects
restore the entire mind. Mind begins to know itself as more than
the intellect, and the Self is again more than the individual.
Spiritual experience is mystical or
hidden because it eludes endeavors to grasp it intellectually. It
escapes any classification system and category. This is why
psychologist William James speaks of it as being ineffable—unspeakable
and unknowable in ordinary human conception. Mystical experience
is not comprehensible to the ordinary state of mind; a new self
or consciousness is needed to comprehend it. James’
well-known quote regarding mystical experience stresses its
difference from ordinary consciousness:
Our normal waking consciousness,
rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of
consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the
flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness
entirely different.
Psychology was not a named field of
knowledge until the late 1800s when Freud and William James began
their practices. But various psychological states and entirely
different states of consciousness were known in the ancient
world, as psychologist John A. Sanford states:
The reality of the inner world was
also known to the people of the New Testament. The demons and
angels, principalities and powers, dreams and visions that throng
the pages of the New Testament bear testimony to the conviction
of the early Christian that conscious life was immersed in a sea
of spiritual reality. This same conviction that there was a realm
of nonphysical reality that was experienced in nonsensory ways
continued for several hundred years and dominated the early
formative centuries of the Christian faith.
So spiritual experience and therefore
subjective psychology were part of Christianity’s origins,
even if they could not be systemized as such. And although
strictly speaking the discipline of psychology did not yet exist,
the study of the mind has always existed. Something had to
account for these experiences, and in the Bible they are often
expressed in poetic terms that, in their attempt to symbolize
something beyond words, seem to carry their own supreme logic and
reason.
Psychologists also speak of mystical
experience as a direct way of knowing, often called intuition.
Dr. Arthur J. Deikman quotes philosopher Henri Bergson saying
that there is:
a deep distinction between two ways
of knowing a thing. The first implies going all around it, the
second entering into it. . . . [A]n absolute can only be given in
an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.14
Deikman points out that intuition for
the philosopher Plato was knowing “more than we should”
because it bypasses ordinary rationality based on sensory
experience.15 The same was true for Spinoza:
Spinoza’s definition of
intuition is closest of all the philosophers’ to that of
mystical science. . . . This highest knowledge he termed
intuition, something that grows out of empirical and scientific
knowledge but rises above them. In essence, it is Knowledge of
God.
The mystic has found a way to know God
directly. The mystical experience has as much to do with the
psychology of sacred relationship as it does with that of the
individual. Mystical experience, being the meeting place between
God and Self, is also the meeting place or final destination of
psychology, religion, highest philosophy, and even science.
Some philosophers and psychologists
wonder whether “the mystical state of consciousness is more
basic” than “the waking state.” As stated, the
mystical state of consciousness seems more basic and fundamental.
Philosopher Jacob Needleman expresses the nature of the
difference between these two realities:
In myself and in the whole of nature
there is a reality and an appearance. The reality is freedom,
mind, the realm of divinity; the appearance is mechanism,
materiality, necessary connection without ultimate purpose.
Incommensurate realms—that is to say, the realm of freedom
and mind exists on a scale incommensurate with all the activities
and efforts of my ordinary mind and self.
To experience spiritual experience is to
experience a state of mind more real than ordinary consciousness,
the yardstick of reality being in the experience itself.
Mysticism has always infused fountains
of depth psychology and spirit into Christianity.
The word mystica came into
Christianity by way of the famous late fifth-century Syrian monk,
Pseudo-Dionysius, who wrote the mystical classic, Mystica
Theologia. For him, mysticism involved the secrecy of the mind or
that trans-conceptual state of consciousness which experiences
God as a ray of divine Darkness.
The influential Pseudo-Dionysius (whose Mystical
Theology was written circa 500) as well as the medieval
mystical classic The Cloud of Unknowing championed the
via negativa, the negative way in the practice of mysticism. This
negative way was the process of the mind rejecting (or negating)
as too limited and too human every thought and attribute of God,
in order to come to an experience beyond conceptualization.
Neither God nor the soul’s experiential relationship with
Him can be articulated; God transcends any attribute we have for
him. Within this nonconceptual experience, beyond the self,
beyond the world, God has been hidden.
Contemporary historian of mysticism
Bernard McGinn observes that a strain of Judaism in the centuries
immediately preceding Christianity was moving away from seeing
God’s presence as being confined to the Temple in Jerusalem,
“and therefore to possibilities of divine-human encounter
outside traditional religious structures.” Mystical
experience is, at its highest, just such an encounter between
individuals and God. John E. Smith states:
If experience is understood as
encounter, there is no difficulty whatever in supposing that a
reality can be ingredient in experience while also transcending—in
the sense of not being identical with—that experience.
Smith goes on to write that:
It is sometimes thought that
approaching religion through experience means a denial of what
has been understood in the Christian tradition as revelation. On
the contrary, experience understood as encounter is always
disclosure of reality transcending the one who experiences. . . .
Experience properly understood requires that some place is made
for encounter, for the experiencing self to meet what is other
than itself, whatever that “other” may turn out to
mean.
Early Christians seized upon these
“possibilities of divine-human encounter.” They
experienced in their transcendence of self a new Self, because
even individual experience is revealed at its core to be
relational: encounter with another Being.
The basic conflict within the self, say
the Christian texts, is between inner and outer, light and
darkness, spirit and flesh. A choice is put before the individual
as to which is more meaningful, with consequences as to which
self will be followed and which world will be seen. It is
characterized as an urgent choice because it straddles two
opposing ways of being. Human beings are trained to see along the
horizontal axis, the world spread out before their physical eyes,
and yet real vision takes place along the vertical axis, the Self
that rises out of the world in order to find another with whom
true communion might occur. Mysticism allows the human being to
see what is above and beyond the world and self of the world,
even to make this above and beyond one’s own reality.
Mysticism is a way of following Saint
Paul’s proscription to “not be conformed to this world
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2,
my italics). To be so transformed, he says elsewhere, is to be
glorified in the Divine. As such, to be renewed is to be reborn.
It is to be liberated in the Spirit from the intrinsic
limitations of the world. Paul speaks of his own experience as
taking him well beyond any physical limitation, saying he was
“caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or
out of the body I do not know, God knows” (2 Cor. 12:2). It
was his mystical experiences that helped make Paul what he was,
and which led to the loftiest of his transconceptual thinking.
The psychological process of mysticism
is a paradoxical one to the poor intellect that remains confined
to sensory-based premises. It sometimes takes a long time to get
to something so exquisitely simple. Though perhaps our experience
is not yet strong and does not soar, simply to acknowledge and to
take responsibility for the emptiness within is to stand at the
brink of a sense of fullness. It is the increasingly convincing
nature of Spirit, through experience, that makes the believer
believe. For a few, there are sudden transformative experiences,
openings to vision or to revelation. For others, there is a
subtle shedding of light through the windows of the soul. One
common factor seems to be that each type seeks to maintain
singleness of intention and purpose in heart: The mind is set on
God, the heart fixed on Him. Sanford states of accepting Jesus’
parables of the kingdom of God:
A person who takes his or her “heart”
seriously ultimately arrives at the kingdom, for it is when we
consciously accept the inner world that the possibility for
wholeness emerges.
First comes simple acknowledgment of the
inner world, and then it must be allowed to unfold in the heart
or center of one’s being. Time is given in order that the
heart may increasingly accept guidance from intuition and from
timeless Spirit. The depths of being are eventually experienced
to glow with God, Who dwells in the heart.
In mysticism and in Christianity, the
inner world awaits recognition, calling from within even as the
wayward mind directs its sights outward. To allow this inner
world to reintegrate the mind is to begin to feel whole.
Mysticism seeks only openness to the possibility of highest
spiritual experience to learn firsthand what it is. Ultimately,
to have a great sense of purpose, some kind of deeply unifying
inner experience is required.
I have mentioned that in mysticism there
is an active search, but there is also a natural inner unfolding.
There is an original intention for unification and then a letting
go of the means toward that intention, so that it might find its
own way, so that unity might find itself. The intention is kept
in mind, while faith stirs the fire of the heart to see us
through the dark empty night and into the brilliant light of full
experience. Intention becomes fulfillment, as that which was
before conceived conceptually and imperfectly becomes more and
more that which truly is.
To access the psychological capacity of
intuition, an individual decides against conscious planning. In a
subconscious way, a person learns to follow the inner call rather
than the outer. One must, as Jesus advocates, take the second
place, humble oneself in regard to the world in order to devote
oneself to a higher truth. Much of this work is, by definition,
effortless. Jesus also advises that one be willing to lose
oneself in order to find oneself. (See chapter 8 for an
exposition of how this sense of fullness is found in emptiness.)
This exchange of selves is necessary because, as Jung states;
“Our present day consciousness is a mere child that is just
beginning to say ‘I.’”
Prayer for Experience
For the Christian mystic, to
know Jesus is to encounter him, and to encounter him involves
following him, which involves knowing oneself deep in the Spirit,
as he did. Spirit unfolds inside even while the individual is
preoccupied with the world at arm’s length. The call goes
out everywhere, its light piercing preoccupation, because it
reveals in everyone the urge for reunion with God.
The intellect, trying to understand what
experience already knows, tends to make a legalistic and
formulaic system out of the raw material of spirit, while the
more whole mind of Being much more easily emphasizes the sense of
fullness and freedom found in transcendent experience. The
subconscious mind steeped in the reality of such experience
gracefully begins to reveal spiritual Being. Loss becomes gain,
individual experience becomes encounter. To know it is to value
it, and to value it is to allow it to undo what was ineffective
before, and to unlearn past, imperfect presuppositions about God
and ourselves.
The early Christians prayed from the
depth of their soul that God’s subtle light might shine upon
them, illuminating paths in the wilderness. They prayed that they
might have “the eyes of [their] hearts enlightened”
(Eph. 1:18). They prayed in ecstasy, out of the body and in the
Spirit, to the inscrutable God “who alone has immortality
and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or
can see” (1 Tim. 6:16). They prayed for internal
transformation so as to find themselves within the “unapproachable
light.”
Prayer for experience offers a way to
evoke this inner light of shared experience and the psychological
processes of spiritual transformation. The following psalm,
taking into account the psychological and emotional context of
religion, prays for the process of opening oneself to find
another experience:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love;
According to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions
. . . and cleanse me from my sin! . . .
Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being;
Therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. . . .
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
And put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence,
And take not thy holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of thy salvation,
And uphold me with a willing spirit (Pss. 51:1–2, 6, 10–12).
Paul prays for experience when he asks
that God:
may give you a spirit of wisdom and
of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your
hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which
he has called you (Eph. 1:17–18).
Jesus tells his disciples, “What I
tell you in the dark, utter in the light; and what you hear
whispered, proclaim upon the housetops” (Matt. 10:27). The
core inner truth is hidden no more. Invoking highest mystical
experience, that of union, Jesus prays in John’s gospel:
that they may all be one; even as
you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also be in
us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The
glory which you have given me I have given to them, that they may
be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may
become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you have
sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me (John
17: 21–23).25
This is a prayer for reality; it is a
prayer for unity in the Spirit. Above all else, it is spiritual
oneness that causes the heart to rejoice. It is a prayer for
highest spiritual experience, mystical because it is hidden
within the heart until it is acknowledged as part of oneself, to
remain elusive until it is accepted as oneself.
The process of attaining mystical or
spiritual experience begins quite simply, with the mere
acknowledgment of the inner world. Its vastness and its depths
need not be initially known. Yet once one begins to “taste
and see,” it begins to spring up everywhere. The greater
part of the unconscious is simply the Self that is denied by
ordinary consciousness. When experienced, mystical transcendence
becomes valued above all else, to be sought and found in all
things, and ultimately in the essential oneness of all that
lives.
Sublime mystical experience is not so
much the window as the doorway into Heaven. Heaven and the
mystical Earth gleam through the opened self with the depths of
the living God. Spiritual truth and living wisdom are never
really hidden, nor can they ever be entirely out of reach. They
are always freely given, freely flowing from an eternal source.
In the eternal openness of love, there is no fear. And in the
progress toward the experience of certainty, all that was lost
and hidden now is found, darkness brought to light, the world
returned renewed with the Self, the glory of God, His eternal
creation.
Spiritual or mystical religious
psychology can evoke the experience of Heaven. Through experience
of the Unity of Heaven is revealed the great plan and purpose of
God on Earth. All things are joined at the level at which they
are true to themselves. In the words of Saint Paul:
For he has made known to us in all
wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his
purpose which he has set forth in Christ as a plan for the
fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven
and things on earth (Eph. 1:9–10,).
Toward this end, says Paul: “He
destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ,
according to the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:5).