Today's discussion question

[Keith Davis]

It's possible that those experiences even make it more difficult. The focus
changes from seeking understanding to seeking to repeat the experience.


On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>wrote:

> There may be many kinds of mystical experiences, and there are certainly
> many ways of interpreting them as the individual begins to give language
> and reference to the experience. There is Merton's oneness with all of
> humanity; Emerson's oneness with Nature; Ekhart's oneness with the Great
> Cosmo Head and what all that might mean; Theresa of Avila's oneness with
> God the Son; Jesus' oneness with God the Father; and so on. Given the
> experience, the individual must still translate that strangeness into
> whatever developmental framework that person has attained in the course of
> life. The mystical experience certainly changes the person, but it doesn't
> make them enlightened--though that is the popular view. Enlightenment
> probably has more to do with what the individual does with the experience
> through the rest of their life, and may well be a relative term.
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 6:50 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Any plister ever see the larger than life-size head-on-the-ground
>> sculpure of Thomas Merton in Louisville, at the corner where he
>> wrote he had, not exactly the mystical experience 'y'all are talking
>> about---which he may have had, dunno---but where he felt
>> the oneness of all humanity, all the poor in the streets of Louisville
>> and all of humanity? ..Maybe he compared it then to
>> experiencing all of humanity as the mystical body, dunno....
>>
>> Anyway, with the eyes open, it freezes the experience as though it were
>> the start of a seizure....
>> I like the sculpture and the fact of it there......
>>
>>   *From:* Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
>> *To:* P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> *Sent:* Saturday, August 17, 2013 8:07 AM
>>
>> *Subject:* Re: Today's discussion question
>>
>> Merton is an interesting choice. From secular skeptic to Trappist to a
>> spiritually egalitarian embrace of Budhhism . This seems to mark the path
>> of many mystics and the mystic within. Discipline is part of  a grounded
>> and enduring spirituality, but no tradition of discipleship or practice can
>> fully contain the the breadth of a spiritually liberated mind, no words can
>> do it justice.
>>
>> Still I find much of what has been written as a result of these kinds of
>> experiences inspiring, delightful and practically useful.  I also find that
>> people who have been tempered by such experiences and who have treated
>> religions with respect to be less intellectually brittle, less obsessively
>> combative.
>>
>>
>> On Aug 17, 2013, at 7:48 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> > I suspect that I am misreading Ian here....the idea that the mystical
>> > experience is ineffable, as William James defines it in his famous
>> > definition is, I now suspect, what Ian is getting at.
>> >
>> > And, I agree with James and like his definition.
>> >
>> > But to argue that mystical experience and, say traditonal religion,
>> > the great religions, organized religion...etc. is at odds with
>> > mystical experience doesn't make any sense. There is tension,
>> > certainly.
>> >
>> > Take a look at Thomas Merton. What about the current Pope? All that
>> > money, tradition, power, bad history...but that man is a mystical one;
>> > he has experienced the devine. His practical approach to the church
>> > bank, to the homosexual faction in Rome, to his visit to Brasil, these
>> > may seem compromises a mystic would not make, but this is not the
>> > history of mystical experience.
>>
>>
>>
>


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