by Marinus Jan Marijs
Is mysticism pre-rational or trans-rational?
Mysticism as a concept has been variously defined in quite opposite terms:
On the one hand, it has been defined as:
- Vague, groundless speculation;
- Obscure or irrational thought;
- Extreme emotionalism;
- Hopelessly romantic, illogical and unscientific;
- A psychological disorder.
This group could be classified as pre-rational.
On the other hand, it has been defined as:
- An immediate consciousness of ultimate reality;
- A direct relation with the Absolute;
- Contact with transcendent dimensions;
- Communication with the divine;
- The experience that everything is interconnected and has a single source.
This group could be classified as trans-rational.
Considering the lives, philosophy and impact on humanity of the world’s great mystics, it is hard to dismiss their achievements as the irrational fruits of hopeless romanticism or psychological disorder. It is easier to see mysticism as it manifested within that group of people as a form of functioning that transcends reason.
Many are the mystics who have attained extraordinary achievements and many brilliant thinkers have had mystical experiences. In the next pages I want to describe some of the achievements of the great mystics. But first the time period in which they lived:
Founders of religions:
Zoroaster: ± 1500 – 1200 BC
Moses: 13th century BC
Mahavira: 599 – 527 BC
The Buddha: 560 – 480 BC
Lao Tzu: ± 500 BC
Jesus: 4 BC: – 33
St. Paul: 0 – 65
Bodhidharma: 470 – 543
Muhammad: 570 – 632
Philosophers:
Pythagoras: 575 – 499 BC
Heraclitus: 544 – 484 BC
Parmenides: 512 – 443 BC
Empedocles: 493 – 433 BC
Socrates: 470 – 399 BC
Plato: 427 – 347 BC
Nagarjuna: ±150 – 250
Plotinus: 205 – 270
Shankara: 788 – 820
Maimonides: 1135 – 1204
Spinoza: 1637 – 1677
Scientists:
Paracelsus: 1493 – 1541
Pascal: 1623 – 1662
Einstein: 1879 – 1955
Schrödinger: 1887 – 1961
Heisenberg: 1901 – 1976
Moralists:
Isaiah: 8th century BC
Confucius: 551 – 479 BC
Emerson: 1803 – 1882
Tolstoy: 1828 – 1910
Albert Schweitzer: 1875 – 1965
Gandhi: 1869 – 1948
Poets and writers:
Chuang Tzu: 369 – 286 BC
Attar: 1142 – 1220
Sadi: ±1200 – 1292
Rumi: 1207 –1273
Dante: 1265 – 1321
Kabir: 1440 – 1518
Shakespeare: 1564 – 1616
Blake: 1752-1827
Pushkin: 1799 – 1837
Balzac: 1799 – 1850
Whitman: 1819 – 1892
Tagore: 1861 – 1941
Yeats: 1865 – 1939
Gibran: 1883 – 1931
Founders of religions:
ZOROASTER, founder of the Zoroastrian religion in Persia. His ideas influenced Judaism and Christianity.
MOSES, Hebrew prophet who had mystical experiences. Lawgiver.
MAHAVIRA, founder of Jainism. A mystic with deep considerations on moral issues.
BUDDHA, founder of Buddhism, mystic who attained enlightenment. While nirvana/enlightenment is transrational, the Buddha’s teachings themselves are rational, and yet he taught at a time when most religious teachings where mythical. He had deep insights with brilliant clarity.
LAO TZU, founder of Taoism, mystic. A major figure in Chinese philosophy.
JESUS, the central figure in Christianity. An enlightened mystic and spiritual and moral genius. His teachings include several paradigm shifts:
- From justice to forgiveness;
- From tribal to universal;
- From egocentrism to altruism;
- From conformism to authenticity;
- From material to transcendental;
- From aggression to non-violence;
- From personal to ultimate concern.
Henryk Siemiradzki Christ with Martha and Maria, 1886
click on the painting to view a larger image
PAUL, mystic, early leader of the Christian Church.
BODHIDHARMA, founder of Zen Buddhism, which had a great influence on Japanese art, especially poetry, calligraphy and painting.
MOHAMMED, prophet of Islam. His political power brought about the unification of Arabia. This was of great historical significance, as without this unification the great development of the Arabic culture would have been impossible.
Philosophers and mathematicians:
PYTHAGORAS, a mystic and philosopher. He was the first mathematician and made influential contributions to philosophy, moral rules and religion.
HERACLITUS, a mystic and philosopher. He developed a philosophy of unity of opposites and eternal change. With Heraclitus, ethical observations and human values became central to philosophy.
PARMENIDES, a mystic and philosopher, is considered by many to have invented logic. His contribution to philosophy was the method of reasoned proof for assertions. He developed a philosophy about the difference between truth and appearance.
EMPEDOCLES, a mystic, poet and philosopher. He supposed that all matter was made up of four elements. He was one of the first thinkers to state the theory that light travels at a finite but very high speed. He demonstrated that air was a separate substance, discovered centrifugal force and had a theory about evolution and the survival of the fittest.
SOCRATES, a mystic and philosopher. A supreme rationalist. Experienced a divine sign and prophesied the future. His most important contribution to western philosophy has been his dialogical method of inquiry, known as Socratic Method. He strove for self-development and virtue and recognized the need to pursue knowledge.
PLATO, a tremendously influential Greek philosopher with a deeply mystical philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead wrote in “Process and Reality”: “The safest general characterization of the European tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
Plato’s philosophy was revived in Neo-Platonism, Christian theology, philosophy in the middle ages and in modern times.
Werner Heisenberg wrote: “if we want to go beyond physics and begin to philosophize, then the worldview that can most easily explain modern physics is that not of Democritus, but of Plato.”
NAGARJUNA, Buddhist, non-dual philosopher. Used a transcendental dialectic fifteen hundred years before Kant.
PLOTINUS, a great neo-platonic mystical philosopher of great historical significance who wrote about his mystical experiences. He combined mysticism and rational thought. He had a strong influence on Christianity, medieval Jewish and Arab philosophy.
SHANKARA, a Hindu mystic with a non-dualist philosophy. India’s greatest philosopher.
HILDEGARD VON BINGEN, a twelfth century mystic ” was a German writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. Elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play. She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias.” (Wikipedia)
MAIMONIDES: a Jewish philosopher and mystic, the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. He produced a number of discourses on philosophy, law, religion, logic and several medical books.
SPINOZA, a mystic and philosopher. He developed a pantheistic philosophical system and maintained that intuition is the highest truth attainable. Albert Einstein mentioned Spinoza as the philosopher who had influenced his worldview the most[1]. Novalis described him as “God-intoxicated” and Bertrand Russell as the most noble and amiable of all the great philosophers: “…and concerning ethics, there is nobody who can even stand in his shadow.” [2]
LEIBNIZ, a mathematician and philosopher. n his monadology we find the concepts of the many created monads and the one uncreated monad. This has great similarities with the many Atman’s and the one Brahman in the Hindu philosophy.
GEORGE BOOLE, The English mathematician and philosopher George Boole (1815-1864) was one of the first men, after the great Gottfried Leibniz, who believed that the human thinking is mastered by laws, which can be described by means of mathematic. Boole is the inventor of Boolean logic, which is the basis of modern digital computer logic, thus Boole is regarded in hindsight as a founder of the field of computer science.
In 1838 Boole wrote his first mathematical paper. In 1841 he founded a new branch of mathematics called Invariant Theory, later to inspire Einstein. Boole was awarded the first Gold Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1844 for a paper on Differential Equations, whose methods are still used today.
Speculations concerning a calculus of reasoning and applying the algebra to the solution of logical problems had at different times occupied thoughts of the great mathematician, but it was not till the spring of 1847, that he put his ideas into the essay, called Mathematical Analysis of Logic. It was the ground-breaking work that laid the foundations for what is known today as Boolean algebra and the propositional calculus. It not only expanded on Gottfried Leibniz’s earlier speculations on the correlation between logic and math, but argued that logic was principally a discipline of mathematics, rather than philosophy.
It seems Boole have been motivated in his research by his intense religious convictions. At the age of 17 he had a mystic experience in which he felt God called on him to explain how the mind processes thought. He decided to do this in a mathematical form, for the Glory of God
http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/thinkers/Boole.html
A biography of George Boole (1815 – 1864), describes the mystic genius whose ideas have utterly transformed the world in which we live. Computers, information storage and retrieval systems, electronic circuits and almost the entire world of present-day technology depend vitally on the simple but ingenious mathematics he invented – Boolean Algebra
RAMANUJAN was an Indian mathematician who lived during the British Rule in India. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable. Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation.
The Cambridge mathematician Hardy about Ramanujan: He combined a power of generalization, a feeling for form, and a capacity for rapid modification of his hypotheses, that were often really startling, and made him, in his own peculiar field, without a rival in his day. The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems… to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was… beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy’s theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was…”.
When asked about the methods Ramanujan employed to arrive at his solutions, Hardy said they were “arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account.” He also said that he had “never met his equal, and can compare him only with Euler or Jacobi.”
Ken Ono, a professor of mathematics at Emory University, Atlanta, USA who is an expert on Ramanujan, described him as a mystic.
A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and said the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. “An equation for me has no meaning,” he once said, “unless it expresses a thought of God.”
(The Man Who Knew Infinity”, (1991), Kanigel, Robert, page 7 of Prologue).
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, an English mathematician and philosopher. He has been called the “greatest speculative mind of this [20th] century.” He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, religion, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education; all of which were integrated into his comprehensive worldview (Wikipedia) Whitehead about mysticism:
“The use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. It reverses the slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace. If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated”. Alfred North Whitehead. “The Aim of Philosophy.” Lecture Nine in Modes of Thought. New York: Macmillan (1938): 233-238.
KURT GÖDEL, generally considered to be the greatest logician of the twentieth century and one of the two greatest logicians who ever lived (the other one being Aristotle). Gödel also had a deep mystical side. In an interview with mathematician Rudy Rucker he said: ”The ultimate goal of such thought and of all philosophy, is the perception of the Absolute”. And if asked if he believed that the Mind is everywhere, as opposed to being localized in the brains of people, Gödel replied, “Of course, This is the basic mystic teaching.” Gödel worked on a logical proof for the existence of God, in a modified and logically consistent version of Anselm’s ontological proof. Gödel was a theist.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, a mathematical logician
In 1901 Russell had a mystical experience, in his own words:” Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached….
At the end of those five minutes , I had become a completely different person.
Having been an imperialist, I became a pacifist.”
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, philosopher, logician, mathematician
Bertrand Russell wrote about him: ”I had felt in his book a flavor of mysticism, but was astonished when I found that he has become a complete mystic.”
Scientists:
PARACELSUS, was a philosopher, mystic and physician. He pioneered on the use of chemicals in medicine and was the first modern medical scientist.
BLAISE PASCAL was a mathematician, scientist, mystic, philosopher and physicist. At the age of 19, he invented a calculating machine. He is the founder of the modern theory of probability. His literary work influenced Voltaire and Rousseau. His “Pensées” is a masterpiece of literature. At the age 31 he had an intense mystical experience in which he experienced the divine fire.
ISAAC NEWTON physicist and mathematician; Mark Alford professor of theoretical physics at Washington University, described him as ”a mathematical mystic, convinced that he shared a privileged relationship with God”.
“The bulk of Newton’s life was spent not on science as we understand it today, but researching mystical traditions and alchemy, trying to uncover the secret of transmuting lead into gold and understanding the mind of god. The 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes described him as “not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians.” It was this mystical approach that led Newton to question the received wisdom of the ages – much of which had remained the same since the time of the ancient Greeks – and so brought him to new understandings.”
ALBERT EINSTEIN was a theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner. The greatest scientist of the 20th century invented the theory of relativity and contributed to quantum mechanics and cosmology. Einstein talked about “Cosmic religious feeling” [3]
The question has often been raised whether this was conceptual or perceptual:
Theoretical physicist David Bohm answering a question by Renee Weber about mystical experiences: ”Some physicists, like Einstein and Newton have felt that underling unity.” Einstein was a pantheist.
ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER was a theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize winner and mystic, who contributed to quantum mechanics. He wrote about his mystical experiences in “What is life”.
WERNER HEISENBERG was a theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate and one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Known for his uncertainty principle.
He said of mystical experiences that they “Reach the central order of things or events, whose existence seems beyond doubt”, and referred to Pascal’s famous text “Fire” [4]. Philosopher Paul Brunton wrote: “Without learning, studying or practising yoga, Heisenberg, famed nuclear physicist, formulator of the Law of Indeterminacy, unwittingly entered what is a high goal to yogis,´Nirvikalpa Samadhi’. This happened at times at the end of the deepest abstract thinking about his subject. Thoughts themselves ceased to be active. He found himself in the stillness of the Void. He knew then, and he knows today, his spiritual being.”
From “Perspectives”, Vol-1; the Notebooks of Paul Brunton.
WOLFGANG PAULI, an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after being nominated by Albert Einstein, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his “decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle,” involving spin theory, underpinning the structure of matter and the whole of chemistry. (Wikipedia) Pauli favoured a hypothesis of “lucid mysticism,” a synthesis between rationality and religion. He speculated that quantum theory could unify the psychological/scientific and philosophical/mystical approaches to consciousness. Pauli’s perspective was influenced by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose views on reality were in turn influenced by Eastern religions.
DAVID BOHM, theoretical physicist. When Einstein was asked in his later life if he could solve the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity he said: “No, but if anyone can do it, it will be Bohm”.
Bohm developed an ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Bohm put forward a theory of a explicate order (the physical mater) and a series of implicate orders (each consisting of a different subtle non-physical matter).
He also laid the groundwork for the proof of the existence of non-locality.
Multiple ontological levels, holism {in which the properties of the parts can only be defined in terms of the dynamics of the whole} and non-locality have been presumed to exist within mystical literature.
Moralists:
ISAIAH was a Hebrew Prophet. His great concern was ethical behavior and social justice. He had a great influence on Christianity.
CONFUCIUS was a Chinese sage who had an immense influence on the history of China for more than two thousand years. Confucianism became the State philosophy in Japan and Korea. Central to his philosophy were virtue, good social behavior, righteousness, truth and harmony with others.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON was an essayist, one of America’s most influential philosophers. He was a leader of the transcendental movement, which emphasized the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and can be known only through intuition. He became active in the abolitionist cause in the United States of America, for which he delivered many anti-slavery speeches.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, poet, philosopher, abolitionist and mystic.
About mysticism: ”Only one in a hundred millions is awake enough to a poetic or divine life.” His concept of civil disobedience would influence Gandhi, Tolstoy, Martin Luther King and many others who want to resolve political conflicts by peaceful means.
HARRIET BEEKER STOWE Author and social reformer, her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became of great influence in the United States and United Kingdom. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North. About this novel she said: “I did not write it. God wrote it, I merely did his dictation.”
LEO TOLSTOY was a Russian novelist, a deeply spiritual moral philosopher, pacifist and social reformer. Many consider him to have been the greatest novelist of the 19th century, and his “War and Peace” to be one of the greatest novels ever written. As a moralist, his ideas on non-violent resistance had a great influence on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
ALBERT SCHWEITZER [5], a philosopher, theologian, musician and physician. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. His philosophy was based on his idea of reverence for life, which found a practical application in Lambaréné, in Africa, where he established a hospital. His reverence for life was practical, he called his philosophy ‘ethical mysticism’.
ANNIE BESANT, social reformer, campaigner for woman’s rights, moralist and mystic (Arhat level) Mahatma Gandhi who worked with her, once said about her that: ”She awakened India from her deep slumber.”
GANDHI, a spiritual and political leader of India, who led the struggle for India’s independence. He strove for liberation of the untouchables. His non-violent movement gave India its independence, and inspired both the American civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela in his struggle to end apartheid in South Africa.
Poets and writers:
CHUANG TZU was an illustrious writer, philosopher and Taoist mystic in ancient China. His brilliant essays in which a deeply mystical philosophy is expressed in ironic, paradoxical and highly poetical stories, show a deep insight in the nature of the mind, language and cognition.
“Once I, Chuang Tzu, dreamed I was a butterfly and was happy as a butterfly,
I was conscious that I was quite pleased with myself, but I did not know that I was Tzu.
Suddenly I awoke, and there was I, visible Tzu.
I do not know whether it was Tzu dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that he was Tzu.
Between Tzu and the butterfly there must be some distinction.
[But one may be the other] This is called the transformation of things.”
ATTAR, a Persian mystical poet. His Mantiq at-Tayr (The conference of the birds) is one of the great masterpieces of Persian literature. It is an allegorical story of the search of the soul for the Divine:
“The sun of my majesty is a mirror. He who sees himself therein sees his soul and his body, and sees them completely. Since you have some as thirty birds (si-murgh), you will see thirty birds in this mirror. If forty or fifty were to come it would be the same. Although you are now completely changed you see yourselves as you were before…But I am more than thirty birds. I am the very essence of the true Simurgh. Annihilate yourselves gloriously and joyfully in me, and in me you shall find yourselves. ‘So the birds lose themselves in the Simurgh as the shadow in the sun. “Seek the trunk of the tree, and do not worry whether the branches do or do not exist.”
SA’DI was one of the greatest Persian mystical poets. His Bustan (Fruit garden) and Gulistan (Garden of roses) are masterpieces.
One of his poems is found in the entrance to the Hall of Nations of the UN building in New York:
“Of one Essence is the human race,
thus has Creation put the Base
One Limb impacted is sufficient,
For all Others to feel the Mace.”
RUMI was the greatest mystical poet of Persia. Some see him as the greatest poet in any language. His “Masnawi” and the “Diwan-e Shams-e Trabiz-I” are among the greatest works of all of Persian literature:
“We are the flute, the music you,
the mountain we, which echoes you,
the chessman set in line by you,
to win or lose now moved by you.
We are the flags embroidered with the lion,
The unseen wind which ripples us is you.”
DANTE was an Italian mystical poet. His masterpiece “La Divina Commedia” is considered to be the greatest literary work to come out of Europe in the middle ages. Dante wrote the Divina Commedia in his regional Tuscan dialect instead of Latin. By doing so, the Tuscan dialect became the standard for the Italian language.
“High phantasy lost power and here broke off,
Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,
My will and my desire were turned by love,
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
KABIR was one of the greatest Indian mystical poets, and had an universal view of spirituality:
“Abode of the Beloved.
Oh Companion That Abode Is Unmatched,
Where My Complete Beloved Is.
In that Place There Is No Happiness or Unhappiness,
No Truth or Untruth
Neither Sin Nor Virtue.
There Is No Day or Night, No Moon or Sun,
There Is Radiance Without Light.
There Is No Knowledge or Meditation
No Repetition of Mantra or Austerities,
Neither Speech Coming From Vedas or Books.
Doing, Not-Doing, Holding, Leaving
All These Are All Lost Too In This Place.
No Home, No Homeless, Neither Outside or Inside,
Micro and Macrocosm Are Non-Existent.
Five Elemental Constituents and the Trinity Are Both
Not There Witnessing Un-struck Shabad Sound is
Also Not There.
No Root or Flower, Neither Branch or Seed,
Without a Tree Fruits are Adorning,
Primordial Om Sound, Breath-Synchronized Soham,
This and That – All Are Absent, The Breath Too
Unknown
Where the Beloved Is There is Utterly Nothing
Says Kabir I Have Come To Realize.
Whoever Sees My Indicative Sign
Will Accomplish the Goal of Liberation.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was an English playwright and poet. His works are regarded as the greatest in English literature. Some of his sonnets describe mystical experiences and mystical insights.
Sonnet 33:
“…Even so my sun one early morn did shine with all triumphant splendour on my brow
but out! Alack! He was but one hour mine
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now
Yet him for this my love not with distaineth
Suns of the world may stain, when heaven’s sun staineth.”
WILLIAM BLAKE was an English artist, mystic, poet and visionary painter, with extraordinary powerful imagery.
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
PUSHKIN, was a Russian poet and author. Many regard him the greatest poet and founder of modern Russian Literature. He described a mystical experience in a poem:
“Tormented by thirst of the spirit,
I was dragging myself through a gloomy forest,
When a six-winged seraph
At the cross-roads appeared to me.
With fingers light as a dream
My eyes he touched,
And my eyes opened wide,
Like those of a frightened she eagle.
My ears he touched,
And roaring and noise filled them;
And I heard the trembling of the heavens;
And the high flight of the angels,
And the movement of the creatures beneath the sea,
And the growing of the grass in the valleys!
And he laid hold of my lips,
And tore out my sinful tongue —
Sinful, frivolous and cunning;
And the sting of a wise serpent,
Between my unconscious lips,
With bloody right hand he planted.
And he cut through my breast with a sword,
And took out the trembling heart,
And a coal blazing and flaming,
Into the open breast he thrust.
Like a corpse I lay in the desert,
And the voice of God called me:
Rise up, Prophet, and see, and understand!
Filled full of My Will,
Going forth over sea and land,
Set men’s hearts afire with the Word.”
BALZAC was a French novelist who founded the realist school of fiction. Two of his novels “Louis Lambert” and “Seraphita” are semi- autobiographical, and have mystical consciousness as their main element.
“It passes beyond everything, like the whirlwind or the thunder, and partakes of the nature of God.
You acquire alacrity of spirit; in one instant you can be present in every region; you are borne, like the Word itself, from one end of the world to the other.
There is a harmony – you join in it; there is a light – you see it;
There is a melody – its counterpart is in you. In that frame you will feel your intellect expanding, growing, and its insight reaching to prodigious distances; in fact, to the spirit, time and space are not.
Distance and duration are proportions proper to matter; and spirit and matter have nothing in common.
Although these things proceed in silence and stillness, without disturbance or external motion, everything is action in prayer; but vital action, devoid of all substantiality, refined like the motion of worlds into a pure and invisible force.
It comes down from above like light, and gives life to the souls that lie in its rays, as nature lies in those of the sun. It everywhere resuscitates virtue, purifies and sanctifies action, peoples the solitude, and gives a foretaste of eternal bliss.
When once you have known the ecstasy of the divine transport that comes of you internal struggles, there is no more to be said; when once you have grasped the sistrum on which to praise God, you will never lay it down. Hence the isolation in which angelic spirits dwell and their scorn of all that constitutes human joys.”
WALT WHITMAN, an American poet. One of the greatest 19th century American poets. “Leaves of grass” is his masterpiece. A great many of his poems are about mystical experiences:
“Santa Spirita, breather, life,
Beyond the light, lighter than light,
Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping
Easily above hell,
Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine
Own perfume,
Including all life on earth, touching, including
God, including Saviour and Satan,
Ethereal, pervading all (for without me what
Were all? What were God?)
Essence of forms, life of the real identities,
Permanent, positive (namely the unseen)
Life of the great round world, the sun and
Stars, and of man, I, the general soul,
Hence the square finishing the solid, I the
Most solid,
Breathe my breath also through these songs.”
TAGORE was an Indian poet, philosopher, mystic, and Nobel Prize winner. He saw the Divine as a world-filling Light.
“Light, my light, the world-filling light,
the eye-kissing light, hearts-sweetening light!”
YEATS, an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic, Nobel Prize winner. He wrote poems about mystical subjects:
“My soul fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known –
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone.”
KALIL GIBRAN was a poet, painter and mystic. His best-known work is “The Prophet”, poetry with mystical insights.
“On Joy and Sorrow
Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow. And he answered; Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be? The deeper the sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was
Burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes
your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you
Shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “joy is greater than sorrow, and others say,
“Nay, sorrow is the greater. But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your
board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at stand still and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.”
Pacifism
One Morning Outside the Door of the Louvre, 1880, Edouard Debat-Ponsan, depicts the Queen of France, Catherine de Medici, calmly surveying the victims of the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
Wars
Is religion the major cause of wars?
There is no doubt, that if religion is connected with political and military power
it can be the cause of war.
However the major cause of war isn’t religion as the list here below shows:
Numbers of deaths in non-religious wars in the last century:
Russo-Japanese War. 1904–1905 160.000
First world war 15 million
Russian civil war 9 million
Stalin (Outside WW 2) 20 million
Second world war 60 million
First Indochina War 1946–1954 (the French Indochina War) 400.000
Chinese civil war 2.5 million
Mao 40 million
Tibet 600,000
Congo free state 1886-1908 8 million
Mexico 1910-20 1,5 million
Turkish genocide in Armenia 1.5 million
China 1917-28 800,000
China Nationalist era 3.1 million
Second Italo-Abyssinian War 1935–1936 (also known as the Second Italo-Ethiopian War or the Abyssinian War) 760,300
Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 630.000
Korean war 2.8 million
North Korea 2 million
French-Algerian War 1954–1962 960,000
Rwanda and Burundi 1.35 million
Second Indochina war 3.5 million
Ethiopia 62-92 400,000
Nigeria 66-70 1 million
Bangladesh 1971 1.25 million
Khmer Rouge 1.65 million
Mozambique 75-92 1 million
Afghanistan 79-01 1.8 million
Iran-Iraq war 80-88 1 million
Sudan 1983 onwards 1.9 million
Kinshasa, Congo 1.9 million
Rwandan Genocide 1994 800,000
Total deaths: 183 million (183, 510.300)
Just in the last century
The historical evidence once more is quite clear: That “religion is the cause of most wars” has no basis in historical fact.
Most spiritual teachers were pacifist.
Christ on the Mountain, Edouard Debat-Ponsan 1901
[1]: Paul Arthur Schilpp edited; “Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist”.1951.
[2]: Bertrand Russell; “History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day”, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1946.
[3]: Albert Einstein; “The World As I See It”. Watt & Co, London, UK, 1940.
[4]: Heisenberg; in “Quantum Questions”; Ken Wilber.1984
[5]: George Seaver; “Albert Schweitzer, the man and his mind”, London, 1948.
