#mysticism

'Mysticism' here means, in the literal sense, a change of sensory impressions and organ sensations into something unreal and beyond this world. ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#meaning #mysticism #change

Mysticism, poor mysticism! When it is underestimated and oversimplified, it comes down from its original sphere and stands beside religion. ↗

— Sri Chinmoy

#comes #down #mysticism #original #poor

In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram —impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive. ↗

— Evelyn Underhill

#experience

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#mysticism #skepticism #faith

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#san-francisco #travel #mysticism

That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking. ↗

— Peter Rollins

#religion #spirituality #religion

The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind. ↗

— Peter Rollins

#religion #spirituality #religion

For glory befits God because of His majesty,while lowliness befits man because it unites us with God. ↗

— St. Diadochos

#humility #mysticism #religion #religion

Lacan’s defenders (as well as those of the other authors discussed here) tend to respond to these criticisms by resorting to a strategy that we shall call “neither/nor”: these writings should be evaluated neither as science, nor as philosophy, nor as poetry, nor ... One is then faced with what could be called a “secular mysticism”: mysticism because the discourse aims at producing mental effects that are not purely aesthetic, but without addressing itself to reason; secular because the cultural references (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, mathematics, contemporary literature ... ) have nothing to do with traditional religions and are attractive to the modern reader. ↗

— Alan Sokal

#mysticism #postmodernism #poststructuralism #religion

No non-poetic account of reality can be complete. ↗

— John Myhill

#god-s-whisper-creation-s-thunder #john-d-barrow #john-myhill #metaphysics #mysticism