LIVING THE JOURNEY
The journey of life is a shared experience whether one is sitting alone in a lounger reading a book, sitting on the floor meditating, or marching for a cause. We share this journey, at this very moment, with every other living entity in the universe. We are all spinning through time and space together and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Even the universe imploding offers no guarantee that this journey would end. The end of physical existence does not negate the possibility or the probability that life goes on and that the journey continues in another dimension or realm of being.
Life hints at life yet to be.
What that means remains a mystery to me. Life is always an act of faith - a walk in the dark with the hope of seeing light at the end of the journey. Life after life would by extension be an even a greater act of faith; as an act of God's faithfulness in the creative beingness that is God.
Who can know the mind of God?
Faith is the only path that leads to God - not what I know, not what I believe, but what I am willing to encounter in the hope of being loved beyond all belief and comprehension.
I see this life as a mystic journey full of awe and wonderment; that is, when I take the time to still and remind myself of it. There is much though that can distract me - much that can anger me, sadden me, and make me despair.
A ZEITGEIST OUT-OF-SYNC WITH THE UNIVERSE
The zeitgeist we are living in seems suddenly out of sync with the universe and has opened a door through which has emerged a perennial presence that is small-minded, willfully ignorant, ridiculously violent, and ultimately self-destructive.
There. I said it - The distress and unease I feel over what is happening in my country and around the world. I started writing on the day when white supremacist groups and Neo-Nazis are marching in Charlottesville Virginia espousing hatred and fear on an unthinkable scale. Since that event, I also can't help but think of oneness my wife and I feel with the victims of terrorism on the streets of Nice, France and Barcelona, Spain. Like millions of others in the world, we strolled these same streets filled with the diverse beauty of humanity that is drawn to those beautiful, peaceful settings as we were when travelling in the Mediterranean two years ago. My heart is simply sickened by such mindless carnage in all these places and all places throughout our world.
It's a feeling that has prompted me to step back, take a deep breath, and recognize the obvious; that very little has changed with regard to human nature since the dawn of human history. As much as I entertain hope for humanity (and I do) it is tempered by the sobering reality that we, as a whole, continue to rely on our reptilian responses to any perceived threats to our survival, real or contrived. I am no exception to such impulses, which is another reason to write about them. They must be recognized in one's self and fought daily. This is especially difficult to do when reasoned intellect and civility is marketed as unfashionable, as it has from time to time throughout human history and as it is being marketed in the world, today.
MIND THEORY AND MYSTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
The intellectual mind is readily subjugated by the instinctual/reptilian mind. There is a safeguard for the intellectual mind which can give one pause before succumbing to one's instinctive inclinations. Reason invariably fails against an instinctive onslaught without the perspective of intuition (the broader picture).
The human mind is an exchange of three processes, but we tend to focus on the intellectual which makes us prone to ignore our instinctual impulses when they arise or the availability of intuition that can offer the intellect greater perspective by which to make rational decisions. I have written several posts about the reasoning (intellectual) and the instinctual mind, but very little about the intuitive mind.
In order to enter into a discussion of the mystical landscape we are traversing, requires one to take a closer look at the means by which we consciously perceive such a journey. Mind theory is helpful in understanding mystic consciousness. Mind theory, as I use it here, relates to our conscious perception that is the result of the intricate interplay between the instinctive, intellectual, and intuitive properties of the mind. By themselves, instinct reacts to experience as it relates to one's sense of survival, and intellect defines experience as it relates to one's retained knowledge of experiences that came before. It is intuition that distills these processed experiences into insight.
The capacity for mystic consciousness resides in all of us, but in an era in which we are blitzed by a variety of distracting sound bytes and video clips it can easily be ignored. We need a transfigured perception of who we are in God and of the time and place in which we live to be at peace with where we're going. We share this mystic journey with those who are present and those yet to come. We also share it with those who have gone before. Their stories have been handed to us as a guide to mystic path of faith we're on.
In pursuing this topic, I've chosen to reference the ancient scriptures I am familiar with; the Hebrew and Christian scriptures of the Bible. To begin a conversation about the mystic journey, I have chosen a wanderer who I consider to be the earliest recorded mystic in this tradition, Abraham.
BRIDGING THE MYTHIC TO THE MYSTIC
My reason in choosing Abraham as the starting place in biblical literature for a discussion on the mystical journey is that, although I consider the story of Abraham to fall into the biblical genre of legendary literature, Abraham personifies within this genre a simple man of extraordinary faith who seemingly has no desire to draw attention to himself. If anything he seems to avoid it. He's is not a heroic figure in the traditional sense of heroic legends. There is an everyday, everyman quality about Abraham that makes him a perfect example of a mystic traveler who becomes a bridge from the mythic to the mystic, from a general theistic perspective to a particular theistic perspective.
The clearest indication that one is dealing with a mystic in biblical literature is a noted change of a person's identity. Abraham begins this journey as Abram and his wife Sarah who starts out as Sarai. The mystic invariably becomes a changed person who crosses a metaphorical step, crosses a bridge, or climbs a ladder that changes the person and that person's perspective of the world in which he or she lives.
In the Book of Genesis, the human story begins with our mythical first parents, Adam and Eve who experience an apophatic transfiguration from a vision of paradise ( oneness with God, with each other, and with all creation) into the vision of the our present differentiated and discriminating world, as destined to wander on a journey we recognize as mortal life.
I can't help but notice that almost every painting depicting Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden (the vision of Paradise) intuitively shows Adam covering his eyes - a vision lost to him. In Masaccio's fresco, "The Expulsion," one is given a sense of disorientating despair that is depicted in Eve's face as the guiding voice of God becomes silent. We will come back to the importance of God's silence in discussing the mystic journey.
The Book of Genesis, however, keeps the hope of Paradise regained alive. As Adam, Eve, and their immediate descendants venture further into the reality we now live, they retained the memory of what was lost in the form of a prophetic promise. In discussing the mystic journey from the perspective of Abrahamic monotheism this prophetic promise is foundational; in that, it becomes an intuitive reference point that is experienced as a persistent sense of longing or beckoning the pulls one along the unitive path that is the mystic journey.THE PROMISED LAND
We see this beckoning and longing for a "promised land" as a promise out of reach in the life of Abraham, Sarah, and their immediate descendants. They die before it is ever fully realized, and in many ways it remains unfilled promise. There is something profound at play in the tale of Abraham, his descendants, and this foundational promise. There are two tracks, two versions of this promised land: one that is fundamentally geographic and one that is mystically intuitive; one that is rooted in the mundane differentiated world and one that is rooted in a multidimensional universe that is paradoxically unitive in its multidimensionality - identified in scripture as paradise.
In my next post, I will focus on the mystic vision offered in the story of Abraham.
Until then, stay faithful.
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