Category: Mysticism
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Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief
Substack latest. One day, well over 40 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person. Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!" It was a wholly spontaneous cri de…
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A Contemplative Nun on Thomas Merton
This just over the transom from Karl White: Hope you're well. May be of interest. ‘I have never met a real contemplative who found Merton useful’: Letters reveal Sister Wendy’s ambivalence about Gethsemani’s famous monk | America Magazine July 30, 2018 Dearest Robert, I feel about [Henri Nouwen] as I do about Thomas Merton. There…
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Buber on Buddhism: Notes on a Trenchant Critique
Substack latest. Martin Buber's critique of Buddhism, and of mysticism generally, is formidable.
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Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity
The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment. The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical.…
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Three Theisms: Ontic, Alterity, and Onto-Theological and their Liabilities
There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. One way into the problem is via the following aporetic triad: 1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence. 2. For any x, y, if x depends for its existence on y, and…
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Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience
"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it. Imagine someone…
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Two Worries about Meditation
One Christian friend worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha. He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable. As such, they cannot be veridical deliverances of any…
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Big Sur, Kerouac, and Being on the Edge
Dwight Green writes, I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year. A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking…
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The Old Soul
The old soul sees, while his body is yet young, that this world has nothing to offer us that is finally satisfactory.
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Are You an Old Soul?
Don't be put off by the New Age-y vibe of this article. There are real insights here, and the internal links are worth following out.
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The Sensus Divinitatis Waxes and Wanes
Our sense of the reality of the Unseen Order and the Unseen Other waxes in the measure that we detach our love from the objects of the senses and the pleasures they promise but never quite deliver. It wanes as we lose ourselves in the diaspora of the sensory manifold and its multiple temptations and…
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Thought, Prayer, Meditation
"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain…
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A Philosopher’s Sign of the Cross
In the name of the Principle, and of its principal Exemplar and Expression, and of the dialectical Unity of the Two.* "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Secundum Ioannem 1, Prologus.…
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This Morning’s Meditation: Notes with the Help of Poulain
Today's sitting ran from 3-3:45 am. It was focused and intense, but dry, as most sessions are. The wayward mind was brought to heel, but discursive operations continued. I was hard by the boundary that separates what Poulain calls the prayer of simplicity from what he calls the prayer of quiet. But I remained this…
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Is Buddhism a Religion?
Julius Evola in The Doctrine of Awakening, pp. 9-10, states unequivocally, . . . Buddhism — referring always to original [Pali] Buddhism — is not a religion. This does not mean that it denies supernatural and metaphysical reality, but only that it has nothing to do with the way of regarding our relationship with this…