Mysticism Needs No Defense

Mysticism is the only way you can hear God. Symbolism — also referred to as parable, or parabolic language — is the language of conviction, faith, and of the heart. That’s how God designed it.

We refer to “the world” not as a literal planet Earth, but as the fallen state of humanity as a whole. To be “worldly” means pulling away from the spiritual and moral, and hunkering down into the fallen nature. Fallen nature is blocking out revelation. It means a commitment to trusting human capabilities apart from connecting to the Spirit Realm. It means trusting the senses and reason. And despite conscious efforts to the contrary, it inevitably means emotion/sentiment has a dominant, if unconscious, position without the blessing of divine guidance.

So we have another symbolic term: “the flesh.” It isn’t a matter of literal bodily composition, but a term indicating the human predisposition to silence our capacity for faith and commitment to divine revelation. It includes the effects of emotion, senses and reason unrestrained by the heart of moral conviction. Human reason is utterly fallen and cannot be redeemed in this life. The only way to handle it is to subject it to the heart.

In other terms, a worldly disposition means having none of the moral vision God offers. It is a state of deep impairment, unable to catch even a glimpse of the divine moral character of God that pervades all of Creation. It’s a condition of moral blindness, having to make up our own moral evaluation of things without the guidance of the Creator. Indeed, it typically means completely unable to see that there is a moral element in Creation. It relies on reason and social pressure to maintain a thin and unstable moral pattern that seldom matches reality. We are taught to believe that morals are imposed artificially over an amoral universe.

We are born in this fallen world with a fallen disposition. It requires the grace of God to overcome. But His grace makes demands. Those demands include a restoration of our natural link to His divine Person. That relationship is depicted — in symbolic or parabolic language — as eastern feudal dependence on God as Father and Lord. It requires learning to trust our native ability to connect to Him through faith in the heart, in a feudal commitment to Him.

And the whole business of being connected and aware requires an openness to revelation and perception that will not pass human logical and legal muster. Faith demands you trust in things that no one in this world can prove. Indeed, the world’s system is filled with the means to disprove anything faith can tell you. The system is rigged to prevent faith.

Prior to the birth of the West, we saw a bunch of cultures building efforts on chasing substitutes for Jehovah. By no means had He been silent over the countless centuries since mankind was expelled from the Garden of Eden. But the primary trick of Satan was to provoke people trusting in any semblance of the Creator that was just far enough off the mark to confuse things. It still left the door open to finding God because it was a system that had people prepared to submit to Him in truth.

With the birth of the West, we have a system that removed everything that made possible serving the Creator. This is the system we face today. It seeks to lock humans under the Fall by making the deception in the Garden into the very fabric of human assumptions about reality. It’s not a matter of serving the wrong god, but of having no god at all. That is, no conscious commitment to a god, in part by having a very confused notion of what that means in the first place. Instead, it’s an blind default of serving all kinds of petty gods by denying that it serves any god at all.

And then this whole thing is established as a demand placed on religions so that they are neutered a priori, or they aren’t allowed to operate at all. There is no faith, so there is only sentiment. The West says the heart is not a capacity for moral discernment, but a repository of mere human sentiment. Religion, particularly Judaism and Christianity, are both locked under the demand that they build their structure using human reason. What believers ignore, but is obvious to everyone else, is that this leaves them with no foundation at all. It leaves the basic assumption of starting from Scripture wide open to attack. Why apply logic to revelation when logic denies revelation in the first place?

But if you do use Scripture, it can be read only as propositional truth. We have a massive cultural Christianity that has precious little to stand on in the first place, so it becomes a law for them to avoid any symbolism. Parables become mere allegories. By no means can such Christianity defend the use of parables, since everything they have to say can be reduced to propositions in the first place. And they miss out on the vast range of truth and wonder because they refuse to let God speak in parables.

They cannot comprehend this: Law in the Bible is direct communion with God.

Let me recommend a couple of artistic manifestations of what we believe.

1. The Misunderstood Mystics by Cindy Powell.

2. Sound of Silence performed by Disturbed — the singer’s enunciation is flawless and clear.

Finally, is anyone surprised at the rage of so many performing artists against mainstream organized religion in the West?