posted April 03, 2009 06:32 PM         

Speaking of errors, that reminds me of Perfection...

Yes, I remember orchidspirit! I think we got in a scuffle once and I'll bet my life it was my idiodic fault and god only knows why. Her experience is one in which I am familiar with. This is also fun when it happens in the car and your surroundings mesh with it all. To the rhythm of the Divine Music (even if it's Blondie), the stream of cars ahead of you, cuts and weaves in and out around each other every so gracefully and intricately together as if it ware planned or we were all invited to a dance and the highway has become a ballroom and we all met up for a waltz. They put on their blinkers and tap their breaklights perfectly to the beat of the music in your car somehow. Everywhere you look the Creator is beaming back, harmonizing, synchronizing, peircing your ears - feels like He's knocking his knuckles on your head..or nose to nose with you. There's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Every pilgrim with his vanity plate is perfectly aligned with every red light and their message is clear. The streets are no longer streets on which you are driving, they are rivers in which you are just being carried along. As thoughts pass the songs change to somehow read them or speak with them and yes, it's all about Him. You start wonder if every artist on the radio is secretly an enlightened master, theyre all singing the same thing. Gliding into your parking space then heading into the store, the music playing still fits. The cashier behind the register and toddler babbling behind you are both speaking with you of God. No one else hears it.

Thanks for bringing that up. I've never tried putting it into words before. ......hey now, why are you holding that straightjacket? lol

posted April 03, 2009 08:08 PM         

Rumi's mysticism is not based on the experience of the Self. The marriage he speaks of is not a means, but an end. His mystic ideal is an eternal courtship, as it were. An ongoing merging with the Godhead, wherein Self and God are indistinguishable, but not static. There is an essential duality, which, on account of its being in constant flux, manifests the unity of the marriage. The marriage, like a composite chart, is something distinct from the Self and God, and, yet, it contains them both, and is higher than both. It is an unnameable romance. The book Meditations on the Tarot explains three types of mysticism: The experience of identity with Nature, the experience of identity with Self, and the Divine Romance. According to the author, the third is the highest of the three. "This experience has as its principal characteristic trait the synthesis of the intoxication of Nature mysticism and the sobriety of mysticism of the higher Self." (~meditations on the tarot)

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Authentic experience of the Divine makes one humble; he who is not humble has not had authentic experience of the Divine....

There are three forms of mystical experience: the experience of union with Nature, that of union with the transcendental human Self, and that of union with God. The first kind of experience is that of the obliteration of the differentiation between the individual's psychic life and surrounding Nature. It is this which Levy Bruhl calls "mystical participation", which notion he coined whilst studying the psychology of primitive peoples. This notion designates the state of consciousness where the separation between the conscious subject and the object of the outside world disappears, and where subject and object become one. This kind of experience underlies not only shamanism and the totemism of the primitives but also the so-called "mythogenous" consciousness, which is the source of natural myths, as well as the ardent desire or poets and philosophers for union with Nature (e.g. Empedocles threw himself into the crater of the volcano on Mount Etna in order to unite himself with the elements of Nature). The effect of peyote, mescaline, hashish, alcohol, etc., can sometimes (but not always, and not with everyone) produce states of consciousness analogous to that of "mystical participation". The characteristic trait of this form of experience is intoxication, i.e. the fusion of oneself with forces exterior to one's self-consciousness. The Dionysian orgies of antiquity were based on the experience of "sacred intoxication" due to the obliteration of the differentiation between self and non-self.

The second form of mystical experience is that of the transcendental Self. It consists in separating the ordinary empirical self from the higher Self, which is above all motion and all that which belongs to the domain of space and time. The higher Self is therefore experienced as immortal and free.

If "Nature mysticism" is characterized by intoxication, that of the Self, in contrast, has the characteristic trait of progressively "coming to one's senses", with the aim of complete sobriety. A philosophy based on the mystical experience of the Self, which represents it in the purest way and is least distorted by the addition of hazardous intellectual speculations, is that of the Indian school of Sankya. There the individual purusha is experienced in its separation from prakriti (i.e. all movement, space and time) as immortal and free. Although the same experience is found at the basis of Vedanta philosophy, its followers are not satisfied with the immediate experience which teaches nothing more, and nothing less, than that the true self of man is immortal and free, but they add the postulate that the higher Self is God ("this soul is God" -- "ayam atma brahma", Mandukya Upanishad, 2). The Sankya philosophy, in contrast, remains within the limits of the experience of the higher Self as such and in no way denies the plurality of purushas (i.e. the plurality of immortal and free higher Egos), nor does it raise the individual purusha to the dignity of the Absolute -- Which has resulted in it being considered an atheistic philosophy. It is so, if one understands by "atheist" the frank confession: I have not had experience of anything higher than the immortal and free Ego; abiding by the experience, what can I say in good faith? Sankya is not a religion and therefore does not merit being classified as "atheistic" any more than, for example, the modern psychological school of Jung does. On the other hand, can it be considered as proof of belief in God to attribute to the higher Self of man the dignity of the Absolute?

The third sort of mystical experience is that of the living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the God of St. Augusting, St. Francis, St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross in the Christian tradition, the God of the Bhagavad-Gita, Ramanuja, Madhva and Caitanya in the Hindu tradition. Here it is a matter of union with God in love, which implies a substantial duality being essentially at one.

This experience has as its principal characteristic trait the synthesis of the intoxication of Nature mysticism and the sobriety of mysticism of the higher Self. The term coined by tradition to express the state where ardent enthusiasm and profound peace manifest themselves simultaneously is that of "beatitude", or "beatific vision" (i.e. beatitudo, or visio beatifica). Beatific vision implies the duality of the seer and the seen, on the one hand, and their union or instrinsic oneness in love, on the other hand. This is why this term expresses in a wonderfully clear and precise way the essence of the theistic mystical experience: the meeting fo the soul with God, face to face, in love. And this experience is all the more elevated the more complete the differentiation is, and the more perfect the union is. For this reason the Holy Cabbala puts at the centre of spiritual experience that of the Holy Face (arich anphin) of the Ancient of Days, and this is also why it teaches that the supreme experience of the human being -- as well as the highest form of death for a mortal -- is attained when God embraces the human soul. This is what the Sepher Yetzirah says:

And after that our father Abraham had perceived, and understood, and had taken down and engraved all these things, the Lord most high (adon hakol) revealed His beloved, and made a Covenant with him and his seed...
(Sepher Yetzirah vi, 4; trsl. W. Wynn Westcott, London, 1893, pp. 26-27)

And St. John of the Cross spoke of his experiences of the divine Presence in the tabernacles of love only in the language of love.

The three forms of mystical experience have their "hygenic laws", or their "tabernacles" or "skins". They fall under the law of temerence or measure. Otherwise the rage of acute mania, megalomania and complete alienation from the world menace, respectively, their adepts. The breast-plate, the canopy and the crown are the three symbols for the salutary measures pertaining to the domains of experience of Nature mysticism, human mysticism, and divine mysticism.

Now, the "triumpher" of the seventh Arcanum wears a breast-plate, stands under a canopy and is crowned. This is why he does not lose himself in Nature, why he does not lose God in the experience of his higher Self and why he does not lose the world in experiencing the love of God. He holds in check the dangers of rage, megalomania and exaltation. He is sane.

posted April 03, 2009 08:53 PM         

I've experienced Rumi's mysticism, as you called it, in my last couple of relationships & the Marriage while in the dream-state.

quote:

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Authentic experience of the Divine makes one humble; he who is not humble has not had authentic experience of the Divine....

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posted April 03, 2009 10:15 PM         

quote:

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Authentic experience of the Divine

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Oh man, I doubt any of us have had one.

I think humbling ourselves involves a willingness
to be used as vessels for something higher than ourselves,
even knowing others will attribute this willingness to vanity.

I think some people who appear humble
may, in fact, be "too proud to stand out".
So they hide their light under a bushel, --
but its the light, not their egos, they snuff out.

But we all serve in our own ways, so,
its difficult to know who is proud or humble.
A man may be moved to speak by God, and not by himself,
or he may be moved to silence by God, and not by himself.

I do think that, if we are thinking so much about
whether or not other people are being proud or humble,
that just shows we have yet to humble ourselves.

Personally, I dont think about that much at all.
I just try to speak what I believe is given me to speak,
without letting my own bull get into it too much.

If it means exalting something about myself, --
well, maybe that is something God wants exalted.
False modesty can be just as vain as false pride.

posted April 03, 2009 10:39 PM         

Divine Madness Ch. 1 -- Romantic Love and the Love of God

quote:

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Rumi, in all his poems, speaks of his love for God. He tells us the Sufi loves the night, when he can be alone either with God's soothing presence or torturing absence. We know what Rumi means if we have ever seen another through the lens of our anima or animus. We have known the love of God in the fana by which we have passed through our beloved into an extraordinary clarity. Such a night is the center around which our life revolves:

Night comes so people can sleep like fish
in black water. Then day.

Some people pick up their tools.
Others become the making itself.
(1986: 38)

The black water he speaks of may also be called the black tresses of Layla, who personifies the night. Water and ocean in Rumi's symbolic language always refer to God or the life in God that we enter through our fana Rumi also tells us that these moments of union in which we "sleep like fish" transform the rest of life. If we have really passed away, we no longer "pick up our tools" and work at things from the outside. We become our work; and our daytime life, too, is suffused with love.

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posted April 04, 2009 02:51 AM         

This is an excellent book.