ACCM: Brainstorming

Re: Proposed A Course in Christian Mysticism (ACCM)
Brainstorming is grabbing every idea which might be in any way related or simply driving your concerns. We pray over the mixed collection of ideas, then organize them into some recognizable pattern. The pattern itself often tends to eliminate things which simply aren’t suitable to the project. In other words, we can’t cover everything because the reader would get lost. You can always put the extraneous stuff in another project if there’s enough and it fits together in some way. However, our process must not lose sight of the eventual goal: Building the sort of logic which no longer requires such strategies. Mysticism is not the antithesis of rational organization; mysticism is not reliant on reason. Mysticism seeks truth which reason cannot contain.
Our task is to tame and train the intellect, to harness it to serve the Spirit.
The brainstorm is where I crave your input, dear readers. Here’s what seems apparent to me initially:
This will be an academic level study. It’s not for the casual reader without the level of intellectual development necessary to attain at least a bachelor’s degree. It’s not going to be a huge book, but a study guide, a sort of syllabus.
Western Civilization is based on myth, falsehood, a damaged worldview. It is not consistent with reality as God revealed it.
We’ll have to talk about where we are as Westerners, and outline what it means to be Western. I maintain the capstone of Western identity is the Enlightenment, the final welding of Greco-Roman culture with Germanic culture. We have to talk about what those two inputs are and how they dominate the very structure of thought. We’ll include an outline of the history of this process. Sadly, the Western Church was a primary player in building this mythology.
I will probably need some good references to Aristotle, especially good summaries. I’ll probably include something like Beowulf; it’s Old English Norse literature, but captures the soul of Germanic tribal mythology. It reflects the cosmology and anthropology, two key elements in worldview.
The nature of Western thought is one issue; the nature of Western Christian thought is closely related and slightly different. The dominance of another bastardized worldview is a major problem: Judaism. We’ll trace the shift from Hebrew Mysticism to Hellenized Judaism, which is easy for me to explain.
Much more difficult to explain is where I get my ideas about Hebrew Mysticism. So much of that comes from readings way back in my academic training starting forty years ago. I absorbed it, but didn’t formally organize my thinking until much later. I don’t have any good footnotes or even good authors. Most of the references I know about agree with Judaism; they embrace the Jewish claims about what it all ought to mean. I can justify rejecting that approach, but I can’t easily reference the material to replace it. I sense in memory getting little bits and pieces here and there.
Perhaps that is the task itself of mysticism. This may be the approach we propose in the study course. Each reader needs to build their own internal frame of reference so that, when they read the Old Testament, they get a powerful sense of their own purpose and calling in analyzing what the text means.
What do you think?