After days of rain and weeks of inclement weather, the morning brought clear skies, bright sun and warm temperatures. The creek is high and clear, and the grass green and thick in the unmanicured city park.
T-shirts were de rigueur for people walking or biking along the paths and pedestrian roads. The only downside was the emergence of mosquitoes, which seemed to come in swarms.
From the moment I took my seat at streamside, there was a sacred quality, which seemed to be both outside and inside. The beauty of the earth, which is an expression of unnamable essence, generated a slight pressure in the head, which intensified into “aesthetic stasis” as the mind completely quieted with attentiveness.
The stream flowed by like a small river at one’s feet. Psychological time, which is the continuity of thought, ended with the complete ending of thought in undivided attention. Beyond words one saw that life is a river that begins in emptiness and ends in emptiness, coming from nothingness and dying back into nothingness to be reborn.
The first psychological separation was dividing death from life. And so, since time immemorial, humans have feared death because it meant the end of our precious selves. Therefore it’s a tremendous irony, and paradox, that communion with the ever-present actuality of death is communion with God — if by God one means the ground of all energy and matter and an ineffable immanence.
Having an inner life is a core requirement for a human being, second only to the necessity for food, clothing and shelter. So what does it mean to have an inner life?
Does an authentic spiritual life have anything to do with organized religion, or do all religions begin with mysticism and end up in politics?
Clearly, an inner life is distinct from belief systems and organized religion, despite contorted and contradictory attempts to link mystical insight with organized religion.
An example of the attempt to fuse mystical insight with organized religion is found in an essay, “The Mystical Core of Organized Religion,” by a Benedictine priest, Brother David Steindl-Rast.
His intention in the essay is clearly to uphold organized religion. But he unwittingly offers an opposing metaphor by speaking of the fire of meditative insight, and how it is extinguished by organized religion.
Steindl-Rast writes, “The beginnings of the great religions were like the eruptions of a volcano. There was fire, there was heat, there was light: the light of mystical insight, freshly spelled out in a new teaching.”
“But as that stream of lava flowed down the sides of the mountain, it began to cool off. The farther it got from its origins, the less it looked like fire; it turned to rock.”
That’s a compelling and telling metaphor. But does it elucidate the relationship between mystical insight and organized religion, or confirm how organized religions calcify mystical experiencing?
Brother David confirms the latter when he says, “Sad as it is, religion left to itself turns irreligious.”
Obviously, as a priest, he’s more than inclined to blur the distinction between the religious mind and organized religion in his need to uphold “the great religions.”
“Religions can be purified and renewed whenever a faithful heart recognizes, in spite of all distortions, the original light,” David intones. “Thus the believer’s mysticism becomes one with the Founder’s.”
That simply isn’t so. Religions imply dogmas, and dogmas fossilize into dogmatism. Religions also require conformity to one degree or another, and conformity is inimical to the freedom essential for experiencing inviolability.
Finally, religions require spiritual authority, and authority induces fear, which generates power, conflict, violence and corruption.
Brother David cleverly states the old arguments by priests and pastors against mystical experiencing:
“The established religion asks: Why is there a need for absorption in the Cloud of Unknowing when we have spelled out everything so clearly? And isn’t that emphasis on personal experience a bit egocentric? Who can be sure that people standing on their own feet won’t go their own way?”
These are the canards that gave rise to the false but funny saying that “myst-i-cism begins with mist, puts the ‘I’ in the center, and ends in schism.”
Trying to jump from one side of an unbridgeable chasm to another, Steindl-Rast provides an excellent rejoinder to his first question: “Once the response of the heart expresses itself in thinking, the original wholeness of the response is refracted, or broken.”
With regard to his second question, there is a danger of egocentrism in going one’s own way inwardly, but what priest or minister doesn’t camouflage his ego with his robes?
And as for schism, why should we care about organized religions splitting up in this age of rampaging fragmentation of the earth and humanity, when they are a leading cause of division?
Br. David ends on a contradictory, if not disingenuous note: “Thus, doctrine, ethics, and ritual bear the mark of our shortcomings, even in these earliest buds of religion. Yet, they fulfill a most important function: they keep us connected, no matter how imperfectly, with the truth, goodness, and beauty that once overwhelmed us. That is the glory of every religion.”
That falsehood makes mystics recoil, for religions do not “keep us connected with the truth, goodness and beauty,” but impede our capacity for directly experiencing them in the moment. Doing so is called being a mystic.
We don’t need religions anymore, since any human being with their own inner life has so-called mystical experiences. That means we’re also done with mysticism, and all its pejorative connotations.
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”The first psychological separation was dividing death from life. And so, since time immemorial, humans have feared death because it meant the end of our precious selves.”
But we don’t have any evidence that confirms that fear is valid. We only have belief. What is the point in making that psychological separation? Possibilities abound. Why separate?
”Religions imply dogmas, and dogmas fossilize into dogmatism.”
They don’t imply at all. They are explicit in that Religion is a whole bunch of human rules mucking up perfectly good spirituality.
With that said, help me out of another confusion your words have brought on. Specifically, what is the difference between the word you use frequently in this article … mysticism … and spirituality?
Spirituality vs. religion?
Various scholars have proposed seven major functions of religion, and in the process ask whether religion is becoming obsolete or even likely to survive. An ancillary question to that scholarly one is whether spirituality is similarly becoming obsolete.
(1) Religion is often seen as a natural extension of the human brain’s ability to deduce cause, agency, and intent, to anticipate dangers, and thereby to formulate causal explanations of predictive value that helped us survive. In modern Western society, that explanatory role of religion has largely been usurped by science.
(2) Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefsspecific to each respective religion. Quite frequently the religion’s followers firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world.
(3) Religion regularly has had a role in defusing anxiety over problems and dangers beyond our control. When people have done everything realistically within their power but the problem and/or danger still exists, that’s when resorting to prayers, rituals, ceremonies, sacrifices to the gods, consulting seers, reading omens, observing taboos, and performing magic all come to the fore. All of those measures are scientifically ineffective at producing the desired result. However, we still believe we are doing something, aren’t helpless, and haven’t given up … even if it is a fiction we, like Neville Chamberlain, feel somewhat in charge, less anxious, and able to go on to make our best effort.
(3) Similarly, but with less urgency, religion provides a useful social function by being the vehicle for providing comfort, hope, and meaning when life is hard.
(4, 5, 6, and 7) The remaining four features of religion … standardized organization, imposing political obedience, regulating behavior towards strangers using moral codes, and justifying wars are the youngest of the functions. They were unnecessary until humans began to glom together into rise tribes (with chiefs and stratified social classes) and states,
and seemed to be declining in modern secular states, but have had a resurgence with the rise of nationalist Christianity here in the US.
With all the above said, how do spiritualism and religion overlap … and diverge?