Is the Hound of Heaven nipping at your heels?
(Typically this would appear on my other blog, but I’m testing the response rate difference.)
Introduction
Insofar as one can offer a HOWTO on Mysticism, this assumes a Christian orientation. The threads of understanding will pull in all directions because the focus is on removing impediments to what comes naturally to the Christian — an other-worldly viewpoint, pervasive and rooted in every assumption, showing in every action.
While this does in some ways mirror the non-Christian concept of “achieving enlightenment” you may have heard or read about, particularly in Buddhist and Hindu religions, it is built on a different foundation. It will cause you to come to many of the same philosophical positions as Eastern mystics, but for different reasons. The resulting changes in behavior will be somewhat different, too.
Another difference is we are in the position to describe in more-or-less clinical terms some introductory description of what’s involved. The phenomenon is established in scientific literature, even if that science can’t pretend to explain it fully. Here is where we run into the greatest difficulty, in that far too many Western Christians are deeply suspicious of the whole thing. My apologetic for mysticism itself may help to explain why it’s not only a valid approach, but the the valid approach to Christianity. But standard Western epistemology can be addressed usefully.
I can’t sell you anything you don’t already want. That’s fundamental to mysticism. The whole concept in Western terms assumes congnitive intellect is not in the driver’s seat. That’s not to say we default to subjective emotion, which is a very real problem in itself, but there is an entirely other human faculty for arriving at conclusions. We have several different names for it, but you are probably most familiar with the concept of the subconscious mind. You’ve heard about “Freudian slips” where you accidentally say something which reveals a subconscious thought. More reliable, odd as it may seem, is the contents of your dreams. Dreams are most disturbing because they help you recognize something you may have been consciously avoiding. They are used in psychological treatment because, while the interpretation may be variable, your dreams remembered when awake do indicate something your subconscious mind wants to push out in the open. Mysticism seeks to tap into that subconscious, but the Christian part is avoiding pitfalls easily identified in the Bible as sin.
We assume man is fallen, through and through, and no portion of the fallen man is free from sin’s perversions. There is no faculty you can tap into to climb out of the pit. Should you manage to develop a truly mystical capability, but lack the spiritual anchor of God’s revelation, you will still be utterly fallen. We can’t deny many people outside Christ have something which surely serves to bring them into a far better understanding of the world via a non-intellectual capacity. The discernment point is not so much the words they choose, nor their specific conduct, because yours may be no better. The point is really not even knowing whether they have achieved enlightenment, as it were, but a common viewpoint about things in general. The only other issue is whether you can actually work with them on the ground. The point of Christian Mysticism is not what you know, nor precisely what you do or accomplish, but where your commitment stands. When working with another, whether professing Christ or not, the whole matter at hand is usefulness according to your calling.
The idea of grasping the nature of things, as in the sense of “being,” is a Western materialist concept, and leads to sin. It assumes you are capable of knowing things as God knows them. We drop all such pretense, and simply accept the whole of our factual knowledge is never more than a tentative functional framework for guessing what part anything may play in our calling. That accords well with standard scientific method, but we carry it farther, making it more universal. Not only do we never assume we can know the nature of anything we can observe, but we don’t care. We aren’t going to study anything too hard; we are too busy with other concerns. Specifically, we don’t try to note whether a thing is good or bad, but whether it fits our calling at that moment.
The one and only thing of which you can be sure about is the calling. Something active and living inside of you, which is not precisely you, is moving and drawing you. It will not let you be. At the bare minimum it plants a sense of imperative, whether or not you are able to recognize what is demanded. The only thing you know is where you are right now is not working, and you really must do something. If that won’t go away, then you should think of it as the sense of calling. Christian Mysticism properly seeks to answer the need of obeying that calling which has no words. Christian Mysticism seeks to enter the Land Without Words, because that’s where the answer lies.
