beyond enriched poverty
The relationship between religion and experience is a complicated one to get our head around and I make a sincere bow of respect to anyone who has attempted doing so … *bow * … Some would say that there is no relationship between religion and personal experience, i.e. that religious people believe in dogmas but don’t experience what they talk about. This is true when you see or hear people pointing back to the experience(s) of others, contained in sacred texts and sacred stories, but aren’t able to tell any such stories themselves. If we only remember the experience(s) but aren’t able to have such experience ourselves then surely we’re spiritually impoverished? For many there is a rich and vibrant relationship between their belief(s) and their experience(s).
When it comes to religion, spirituality and experience there is often a strong relationship between “revelation” and “commitment,” at least close to the point in time when someone personally commits themselves to one faith group or another. Here the idea of “revelation” and “personal revelation” come into the picture. And so I’d like to briefly comment on “revelation” and “mysticism”.
We may speak of revelation from the perspective of the initiator, which in turns clarifies that there are two clear senses in which the word gets used: as our ability to pierce a mystery on our own and as another’s ability to unveil a mystery to us.
On one hand revelation can refer to a purely human and wholly creative insight that arises in a moment where the mind’s eye penetrates or grasps a mystery. The mystery may be personal in scope, e.g. a theory or a creative work; the mystery may be universal in scope, e.g. Buddha’s enlightenment or a Hindu’s experience of Self-revelation. Here the onus lies with the human, who seeks out, explores and engages mystery.
On the other hand revelation can originate with a person who unveils a mystery to someone else. We may use this sense of revelation to refer to the appearance and communication of Godde and a variety of other spiritual beings to humans. Here the onus lies on Godde (or another spiritual being), who makes Goddeself known to individuals and communities, i.e. Mystery makes itself clear or plain or reveals itself and hence we speak of the self revelation of Godde. Christians understand Godde to be both revealer and the One who is revealed.
The sacret texts and sacred stories of the world’s religions are also considered “revelation,” though usually in a stricter and more formal sense – that it is something like the alpha Revelation that sets the scene for the revelation of others’. This idea builds on the idea of the revealer and the Revealed being one and the same who takes the liberty to build a body of literature and stories uniquely representing themself along with their claims related to creation and our eschatological future. In this sense, an individual’s experience confirms whether they’re part of a history of experiencing the same Source or establishes that they’re relating to some-Thing or some-One else.
Revelation, in both senses, is central to Christianity and virtually every other religion and spirituality. Unfortunately the aftermath of modernisation leaves most religion impoverished (at least to and in conversation with educated Westerners and those who’re westernising), including the various Hinduisms, Buddhisms, Primal Religions and the Christianities.
We’re certainly more familiar with the idea that only the spiritual elite and spiritual heroes (or saviors or founders) accessed Godde and building on that may have the idea in mind that only those sufficiently qualified (usually through a strict moral ascetisim or an unbalanced lifestyle) experience Godde. From this point of view people who lay claim to a personal experience of Godde are either mad or arrogant. For those who’re religious apart from a relationship with their Source there is no doubt a stronger tension, there may be the allegation that the one laying claim to experiencing Godde for themselves is either being deceived by something or someone else and is about to do the same to everyone lending them an ear.
I can highly recommend Avery Dulles exploration of “revelation” as a subject. In his book Models of Revelation he explores the various ways in which “revelation” is understood, building and exploring 5 different models of revelation (hence the title). In his book, Dulles paints a picture of what Christianity is without revelation:
Can we excise revelation from Christianity? If so then Christianity is a human faith founded on a long tradition of spiritual experience and reflection. A rich heritage of acquired wisdom concerning ultimate nature of reality and the proper conduct of human life – not as conveying God’s own testimony. Revelation is therefore a mythic wa of describing sudden and transforming insights that arise from the exercise of latent powers of the human mind. Scriptures are valued as presenting the memory of the struggles and discoveries of a religiously giften people. Jesus was a gifted religious teacher and His teaching a unique disclosure of God, at least to His own disciples. The Church is the place where the memory of Jesus is preserve, Scriptures read with veneration, and where effort is made to cultivate a life conformed to the wisdom of past traditions (Dulless 1992: 8). The Christian faith is an attitude of mind characterised by special confidence in biblical heritage as being a reliable path to spiritual growth (Dulles Models of Revelation 1992: 9).
I can only describe this kind of Christianity as an enriched poverty, like having an intricate jewellery box without anything precious inside.
The Scriptures reference a rich variety of encounters between Godde and humans as well as between humans and other spiritual non-human persons, e.g. the angels and archangels. Even if we limit the Scriptures in this way, reading them with great respect and meditating on them for spiritual growth the value we’d find in them may cheat us fom their goal – pointing toward a vibrant, experiential relationship in the present characterised by intimacy.
In order to relate to Godde we have to go beyond having a relationship with an idea to a relationship with a person, i.e. we can, should and ought to develop a personal relationship with Godde and Godde must, should and ought to be welcome as part of anything and everything we do that we may speak about as spiritual or even as religious.
“Mysticism” is generally understood as a personal experience of a Source and also refers to the practice of such experience. As Jesus evidenced a personal relationship with Godde and made it known that this kind of relationship is available to us too, then it would appear that the NT and OT would want to make mystics of us all.
Mysticism is currently something I’m exploring in some depth and intend to make the central theme of my posts for the next few posts.
PS. I got the pick from www.thecpl.com and am using it without permission.
Tim – a very interesting discussion. Mysticism is indeed where mature faith seems to head, inmy experience.
From an evangelical POV, revelation is good but mysticism is suspect. In the light of your insights, why do you think this is, what are the reasons for this revelation-mysticism antithesis?
And this leads on to another question – I have become aware of a tendancy to critique “revelation based spirituality” such as James Herricks “The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition” where the concept of “revealed truth” is squarely dismissed. Do you think such New Age views are at odds with your pro-revelation ideas?
Hi Nic,
I think you’ve hit on something I’m looking to comment on further in future – the tension between the notion of the Scriptures as revelation, something we look back to, and the notion of a personal experiencing of Godde, something we can look forward to as present-continuous experience.
Many people today are resistant to the idea of “ongoing revelation”, to the idea that there is post-biblical revelation that is on par with the Scriptures and of equal value to them. People in this category generally consider there to be only one Source and hence only one Revelation, which we already have, and hence are suspect of anything else, even up to the point of being suspicious of the idea of revelatory experience in keeping with those same Scriptures.
The problem with that line of thinking is that it removes the idea of a personal experience of Godde today, which stems from the modernist suspicion of experience, which in turn leads to the kind of enriched poverty I’d like to comment on.
In that sense I’m not at odds with the “new age” views or even the “evangelical POV” as they’re both, more-of-less, the same (and people on both sides of the fence will exclaim, “How can you say that!”.
I’m hoping to take a step back from that particular problem in order to assert that “experience,” “mysticism,” and “revelation” are properly basic to religious commitment and spiritual practice.
From this POV there are different Sources and hence different Revelations. Ultimately this leads on or back to the Problem of Godde as generated by the pluralism of and within religion and spirituality.
Tim – I don’t think that one needs to do an ‘either or’ when it comes to revelation vs personal experience. There comes a point where the seeker realizes that he/she is actually being sought – and that both are happening at the same time and are dependant on one another.
In the christian tradition much emphasis has been put on revelation being contained in a book (as you’ve mentioned). In other traditions one also sees ‘revelation’ – but written in nature and that spirituality is a process of being in communion that, and a realisation as it is written in the Upanishads – “Thou art that”.
Hi Gavin,
I don’t believe I was proposing an “either/or” split?
By “sacred text” and “sacred stories” I include nature, but haven’t stated that clearly. I’ll think about how to rephrase that to be more inclusive (that’s the problem with a blog post being a summary of other writing I guess).
I think that there is a tension between the idea of Godde or Source or Ultimate Commitment [i.e. insert relevant phrase here] as leaning toward “vague, impersonal and unknowable” or “distinct, personal and self-revealing”. The individual can definately both seek and be sought. I’ll have to expand my post to include this reference for my thoughts to be clearer.
“Revelation” is certainly much broader than I’ve referenced here. Perhaps I’m trying to be too brief and jumping too far in too quickly?
Yes – words are always limited when speaking about this kind of thing.
I think that when one is coming from the perspective of a personal god, the other ‘options’ seem impersonal, vague etc. Another way of looking at it is that the transcendant is beyond personality, self or the language to be revealed. But that doesn’t mean ‘it’ cannot be experienced(known) in a profound way, but once experienced there is the realisation that any description or concept that tries to explain it is, in a sense, blasphemy.
So, what we understand as ‘revelation’ must never be seen as ‘It’, but rethar a pointer to That which Is – an invitation to come and drink. Perhaps this is where some of the religions fall short. They focus too much on the finger that points to the moon.
Hi Gavin,
It sounds like you’re following a common premise when discussing mystical experience:
“We have an experience of X, then describe it as Y”.
I don’t believe that the data, i.e. the actual reports of mystical experience themselves, support that premise. This is, however, a prevalent understanding of mysticism and mystical experience. I personally understand there to be a variety of mysticisms, some of which are personal and some of which are non-personal.
We may not be able to fully describe X but we can certainly faithfully point toward X and faithfully speak about X as well as truly experience X for ourselves. And X can be either personal or non-personal if we’re speaking in the abstract or general sense.
When we speak about concrete Sources then we cannot say that people experience Jesus as impersonal or the Void (Sunyata) as personal. Rather, people always experience Jesus as a person and the Void (Sunyata) as something impersonal.
In the abstract we may point toward them as they’re both an X spoken of differently but the Sources don’t themselves support that statement.
I do agree with you that people too often “focus on the finger” and often minimise the validity of another’s experience and report of their experience in favour of a chosen belief. But if we wholly ignore the finger (or rather fingers) then we’re equally pointing at everything and nothing… which may suitably represent some mysticism and religion but does not fairly represent all as we often find a strong link between Source and representation.
Tim – it would be more like saying one has an experience of infinity, and then tries to express it in a finite language. The following is a quote from a book I read recently. It probably articulates it better than me:
“…our rationalization of things ephemeral, our intellectual framing of the transcendent, the thinking brain’s version of the Divine, was just another mask of God. That all expressions of God, like the word itself, formed in the brain of language, were merely thoughts about that which is beyond thought.
No. Before thought.
Before consciousness itself. To speak the name of God is to name the unnameable, to carry a concept of the Divine within our heads is to carry a shield between us and the experience of the Divine…… It cannot be thought about. All notions of God are blasphemies. Things that can be known but not told.”
(Alberto Villoldo – Secrets of the Inca Medicine Wheel)
Mysticism is about exploring and experiencing the mystery of ‘How it is’. That’s really hard to do with a predefined image of how it’s supposed to be.
Gavin,
In the sense of fully describing anything, language falls short for we can always add more. Hence, we cannot even fully describe a sunset or a sunrise!
But our language may adequately describe a sunset or sunrise.
Our concepts and language may never fully describe Godde but that’s not the same as saying that we can’t say anything meaning about Godde and especially should not be taken to mean that we cannot know Godde as distinct from not-Godde or other-Godde.
If Godde were truly indescribable then we could not in fact say that S/He is indescribable for that in itself is a description of sorts.
“There is indeed a whole battery of expressions liable to occur in this context – such as ‘indescribable’, ‘inexpressible’, ‘unspeakable’, ‘indefinable’, ‘unutterable’, ‘incomprehensible’, and so on… However, one should not assume that such expressions are to be taken as quite excluding describability… To say that God is incomprehensible may be to say not that he is utterly incomprehensible but that he is not totally incomprehensible – thus nothing could be known about him including anything that might form a basis for referring to him as God…” (Steven T Katz Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis).
There is in fact a conservative nature and role to mysticism (I’m indebted to Katz for this in his further explorations in Mysticism and Religion and Mysticism and Language, for mysticism often serves the purpose of affirming and confirming given traditions. Only in the abstract does mysticism support a positionless position. In the concrete we should speak about mysticisms for there is not one mysticism but many mysticisms.
The various traditions arise from mystical experience and mystical reports, e.g. Buddhism, Judaism and Islam, and Katz notes (in Mysticism and Religion) that those traditions prepare people for specific mystical experiences, e.g. Buddhism prepares individials for Buddhist mystical experience just as Christianity prepares one for Christian mystical experience. People may have a Buddhist experience outside of Buddhism just as people may have an experience of Christ outside of Christianity, but the pursuit of either Source requires commitment to that concrete Source.
Also, mystics in fact say an incredible amount about who and what they experience when they report their mystical experiences and use language in a variety of ways to enable others to overcome conceptual and other limitations in order to enter into such experiences themselves.
Our language may adequately describe a sunset or sunrise…..but language can never contain that sunset or sunrise, nor can it describe the sunrise or sunset, itself, but the experience thereof.
It is, however, able to create the illusion that what is described is real. It is also easy to, without being conscious of it, build a relationship with the description – a memory. And so we cling to these memories and constantly try and recreate them, believing that this will bring us happiness.
Or – one can realise that nothing exists in and of itself, that everything is impermanent. Ebracing this Emptiness (Sunyata) one is then free from this cycle of clinging to illusion (Samsara).
hmm – please excuse the grammar and spelling mistakes – but there’s no way to edit or delete..
Sure, language is a reference, a pointer or descripter … nevertheless it does have power and effects change and makes things known and knowable to others. Language can well serve the purpose of being a bridge allowing us to cross over into the reality it points toward.
Do you feel that one can embrace the myths of Sunyata (Emptiness, Void, Dynamic Self-Emptiness) and Samsara (Original Ignorance and Illusion) as well as the myths of Godde: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Godde as Person) and the Fall (Original Sin)?
Both Truths co-exist in reality, but not in the same space requiring that we engage them in depth. Both Truths demand our commitment to them and them alone, requiring us to choose between them.
Perhaps they describe different, though equally True, dimensions of creation and Creater and require engagement between them, rather than displacements, in order for us to mine their full value for us today?
That’s a great question. I would really love to say yes – that one could embrace both, but the problem with the latter is that there is such a history of taking the myth literally, that it is almost impossible to ingest it without that poison. For me, it has been much more helpful to put that myth aside.
The Buddhist way of thinking, on the other hand, has a mythology that encourages one not to take it literally. It doesn’t require one to choose it over other myths, but does what a myth is meant to do – providing a path to discover the truth of who we are.
Looking back at the Christian myth from the context of a number of profound mystical experiences, it makes sense. But, I don’t see the Christian path being a helpful way to get there – well certainly not what I, or many others, have been exposed to.
Which is what leads me to say that people trade commitments based on whichever Source they’re connecting with, or rather, most meaningfully connecting with or committed to (as there isn’t always a one-to-one relationship between commitment and connection).
Personally, I find both Original Sin and Original Forgetfulness as helpful and unhelpful as each other.
Ultimately it is the Source that matters and from those Sources flow other “dogmas”, “beliefs”, “teachings”, etc. which we speak of as “revelation” with a capital “R”. Subsequent to the founders of each tradition our revelation follows with a little “r”, with each tradition servicing to connect us with their Source or the various Sources leading us to their traditions.