The Mystics
There has always been “Christian mystics” through the centuries. They provide a powerful balance to the dogmatic literalist and fundamentalists that have inflicted horrific damage in this world.
But here’s something I’ve noticed over the last few years of studying and exploring all forms of spiritual experience.
All these Christian mystics actually share pretty much the same stuff as other religious mystics — Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist etc. Specific theologies and doctrines become irrelevant as the experience itself is the reality.
This is why I personally prefer the Zen and Taoist perspective as it doesn’t use Christian metaphor in it’s attempts to communicate the raw experience, and even though it’s from a far eastern culture and perspective, it does remove any deities from the experience, showing the “essence” of it in a more neutral way.
For those of us who’ve had glimpses of this “enlightenment” (for want of a better word) adding a god into the equation isn’t particularly important.
And yet communicating the power and depth of the experience always ends up being turned into religious concepts by those who love the idea but haven’t experienced it!
Perhaps this is how it will always be, but I do live in hope that our species will finally “see” beyond the words and experience the foundational nature of “what is”.
(reposted from https://www.itslifejim.pub/2021/02/06/the-mystics/)