In the West, there is a nebulous arena identified as the world of mystics. Mystics like John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, and Clare are considered unique, a bit odd and far outside what most of us consider normal human beings. I think my meditation practice and experience of mindfulness is touching on the outside edges of the world of mystics.
I’m not sure what the experience of others might be, but my own experience is plunging me into a deeper reality that can hardly be explained except by metaphor. “It is like…..” is about all I seem able to say. I do think that my experience is not the normal experience of most people around me. In many ways, I have had to abandon the normal, be ready to experience something altogether different.
New insight is often subtle, but it is a genuine awakening to an untouchable and unseen reality. I’m not sure I can adequately express it, and I think it must be experienced to be understood. I have read some of what John of the Cross has written, and he makes sense to me if I remove the personification of God. It is easy to get lost in the God-metaphors and never get to the reality of the John of the Cross experience.
I appreciate some of the intellectual framework of both western and eastern science. But the reality is present in the experience. Science is a wonderful guide, but the insight comes to an open and unformed mind. The “Aah hah” moment must be directly experienced, not just understood.
For me, it works when I can let go with my intellect and be totally receptive to whatever appears. My intellect is helpful sometimes in pushing back the illusions that my imagination is so willing to provide. I often find myself either staring or falling into an immense emptiness. It is such a wholesome place to be.
I wonder about the ‘dark night of the soul’ that western mystics like John of the Cross experience. I think it may have been an essential step along the way to insight, to awakening. The total loss of a personal relationship, the total feeling of abandonment by a personal God were perhaps opening the mystic to awareness and essential union.
Once the personification of divinity was abandoned, once the illusion of a personal connection with the divine was surrendered, only then was there peace, bliss, ecstasy . If John of the Cross were an eastern mystic, he would have called it nirvana.
I have tried to understand what the eastern writers mean by the illusion of the self. I have begun to embrace some of what it feels like to let go of the sense of self. The disappearance of the self is perhaps a passage through which I must go. I wonder if I will see the footprints of western mystics along the way.