Direct Experience Of God Research Articles

Guest Editorial: The Luminous Experience and the Scientific Method

Article purporting that an encounter with the Light during a state of altered consciousness is a direct experience of God. The question of scientific proof is discussed.

Mysticism in the Middle: The Mandorla as Interpretive Tool for Reading Meister Eckhart

Mysticism in the Middle: The Mandorla as Interpretive Tool for Reading Meister Eckhart Jeffrey Cooper (bio) The spirituality of Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) is fundamentally chiaroscuro in form and expression. This word, coming from the world of art, represents in itself the collision of clarity and brightness (chiaro) with obscurity and darkness (oscuro). In one single word we have two opposites existing side-by-side creating a tension out of which arises the transformative interplay between darkness and light. The word, chiaroscuro, therefore is also an example of a language mandorla. This is another word arising from the world of art, but in this case specifically from the world of religious art and architecture. The mandorla is the almond-shaped space that results in the overlap of two complete circles.1 It represents a middle, or in-between, space where opposites collide and “conflict-without-resolution” and arises as the “direct experience of God.”2 Meister Eckhart is both a master of the chiaroscuro and the mandorla. His spiritual art, founded on incarnatio continua, issues forth in both structure and expression through the on-going interplay between human and divine often represented in his works by the relationship between darkness and light. In this essay then I will seek to demonstrate how the mandorla can serve as an interpretive tool for reading the chiaroscuro language art of Meister Eckhart. In doing so I hope to provide readers today with a means to grapple with, and more deeply appreciate, the German Dominican’s mysticism in and of the middle. First, though, a word from the middle space. Reading from the Middle In order to honor the self-implicating nature of my own academic discipline of Christian Spirituality, as well as my own pedagogical goal of always bringing into relationship the theoretical-conceptual and the experiential, I must locate myself here as a man in the middle. At midlife I have found my own sense of “self” suddenly revealed as liminal. My own lived experience is teaching me that the primary paradox that haunts the heart of the journey through midlife is the chiaroscuro collision between limitation (darkness) and limitlessness (light).3 One discovers with age the reality of limitation, but yet, if attentive, one also experiences the expansiveness of a limitlessness that appears as well. When the two collide the experience provides an existential shock that shatters [End Page 1] the illusion of any sense of self as fixed and final, revealing it instead as a fluid entity at play between opposites. Midlife, where the first half and the second half of life collide, is in itself a mandorlic experience, and it has provided me a lived experience of faith that has shaped the lens by which I have been reading Eckhart over the last decade from age 40 to the edge of 50. So for me this lived experience of the liminality that results from the interpenetration of limitation and limitlessness, along with the symbol of the mandorla itself, provides an entrée into Eckhart’s thought. Reading Eckhart from the middle I believe offers unique insight into the structure, content and articulation of his spiritual thought. Now then in order to begin exploring Eckhart’s mysticism in the middle, it is first necessary to more fully explore the mandorla. Click for larger view View full resolution Sad Girl © Photographer NL The Mandorla and the Middle Space In Italian mandorla simply means almond. Therefore, as mentioned above, the mandorla is the almond-shaped middle space created both visually and verbally when two complete, opposing circles or ideas overlap. Perhaps the most well-known mandorla is that of the ancient Christian symbol, the ichthys, or in popular parlance: the Jesus fish. The ichthys is the mandorlic symbol, used by the early Christian community, to express the incarnational reality of Jesus as both fully human and fully divine.4 According to Jungian psychologist, Robert Johnson, this almond-shaped middle space is where opposites meet and conflict-without-resolution occurs as the direct experience of God.5 In terms of the spiritual journey at midlife, in particular, “th[is] middle space is a [End Page 2] mandorla.”6 Midlife is rife with...

HUMAN SALVATION IN AN EVOLUTIONARY WORLD: AN EXPLORATION IN CHRISTIAN NATURALISM

Abstract In an evolutionary world, humans need “salvation” understood as restoring and maintaining well‐being or functioning well. Humans are embedded in, embodiments of, and emergent creative‐creatures of the universe. We have evolved also as ambivalent creatures—doing good, harm, and being bystanders while harm is being done. Multiple factors—for example, genetic, neurological, child developmental, and societal—contribute to malfunctioning and harmful behavior, and multiple religious and secular approaches help restore well‐being. I develop a view of Jesus as a “religious genius” who, grounded in a direct experience of God, taught undiscriminating love and engaged in nonviolent political activism against the unjust domination system of the Roman Empire. Christians and others can follow Jesus by engaging in meditative practices that facilitate well‐being out of which compassion for others and a passion for justice flows. Universal love rooted in Jesus is compatible with an evolutionary perspective that all humans are part of a natural family.

Birthpangs of a Christianity for the Future?

This review of The Jung-White Letters (edited by A.C. Lammers and A. Cunningham) was written by the pastor who gave the eulogy at C. G.Jung's funeral and presents a lively understanding of the Jung-White relationship, suggesting that Jung's letters to White are in themselves worthy as a magnum opus, containing Jung's important psychological concepts. Jung argues for a direct experience of God rather than one that relies upon the theology and doctrine of organized religion, yet he encourages White not to leave the Church, which in his view desperately needed priests whose inner, mystical experience of God could challenge institutional orthodoxy.

The luminous experience and the scientific method

An encounter with the Light during a state of altered consciousness is a direct experience of God. The question of scientific proof is discussed.

The Harmonia Mundi Contemplative Congress

At the conclusion of the Harmonia Mundi Contemplative Congress, the hundreds of participants agreed they had truly been filled with a rich banquet of spiritual food offered to them by seven wisdom teachers of the various world's religions. The congress, held October 4-7, 1989 at Newport Beach, California, was hosted by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and was coordinated by the EastWest Foundation. The three-day congress had as its theme, Awakening the Compassionate Heart. A number of monks and nuns, laymen and laywomen joined the many presentors in attending a semiprivate audience with H.H. the Dalai Lama just prior to the opening of the congress. This interfaith gathering with accomplished teachers of meditation and contemplation from Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism offered an in-depth contemplative experience with one teacher of the participant's choice. Meeting together in mentor groups helped these participants develop a heightened awareness of how compassionate action, rooted in contemplation, could transform one's life. During the congress, participants examined and discussed the interfaith and interdisciplinary relationships of contemplation and compassion. They explored the application of compassion to everyday affairs and reflected on how to integrate contemplative values into the mainstream of society. A meditation room was reserved in which symbols of each of the world's great religions were fittingly represented. Meditation leaders from each tradition were invited to lead a group for forty-five minutes either early in the morning or afternoon. Ken McLeod coordinated the meditation leaders, several of whom were members of North American Board for East-West Dialogue (NABEWD). Father Thomas Keating, a Roman Catholic priest and Trappist monk, also chairman of the NABEWD, was the wisdom teacher invited to represent Christianity. Father Thomas offered the Centering Prayer form of contemplative prayer based on the Cloud of Unknowing but modified for contemporary users. He and others developed the method, which is based on the repetition of a short phrase in a way that develops the power of concentration and aids the meditator in the direct experience of God. Father Thomas was assisted by Mary

Teaching World Religions Through Their Scriptures

AbstractTextbooks on world religions offer a vast amount of factual information that often overwhelms undergraduate students. Because they get lost in detail, the students find it difficult to appropriate the religious traditions into their own experience. Is there a different approach to the religions—one that does not get too bogged down in historical dates or various philosophical movements, yet still remains academically respectable—that might better help them to appreciate the religious traditions? I want to suggest that one possible method might be to study selected key passages from the scriptures of the various religions, in particular their stories (rather than other literary forms). Such stories, whether narratives or parables, exist in the scriptures of all the major world religions. Carefully selected for their transformative and paradigmatic power, these stories easily lead into discussions of doctrines, rituals, ethics, and the other phenomenological dimensions of religion. More importantly, certain basic themes in these stories—desire for the direct experience of God, forgiveness, martyrdom, duty, balance of self-nature-society, and self-forgetfulness, for example—transcend their formulation in any one specific world religion. Student awareness of these and other archetypal themes is a healthy step in appropriating the cultural and spiritual life of their own religious traditions.

Experiencing the Divine Word: A Women’s Spiritual Gathering in Beirut

Fifteen-to-thirty women come together on a weekly basis in a Sunni neighbourhood in Beirut to practice the dhikr.Dhikr, the remembrance of God, is a central rite of mystical Islam. Trimingham (1998) describes the practitioner of mystical Islam as: “... anyone who believes that it is possible to have direct experience of God and who is prepared to go out of his way to put himself in a state whereby he may be enabled to do this” (p. 1). Most mystics trace dhikr back to the qur’anic injunction “… remember God frequently and glorify Him morning and evening” (33: 41). The performance of dhikr varies according to the rules of the different mystical orders and local practices. It mostly includes the invocation of God by the repetition of his names, control of breath, bodily movements, often also chanting and the employment of musical instruments.

Knowledge Of God

In a recent article In Mind, called A Religious Way of Knowing, Mr. C. B. Martin considers the claim made by some theologians to know the existence of God on the basis of direct experience of God. His paper is, he says, “an attempt to indicate how statements concerning a certain alleged religious way of knowing betray a logic extraordinarily like that of statements concerning introspective and subjective ways of knowing. It is not my wish (he continues) to go from a correct suggestion that the logic is very, very like to the incorrect suggestion that the logic is just like.”