... it is almost impossible to use the Mass as a support for pure contemplation, free from discursive chatter in the skull.
The clearly mystical sensation of self-and-universe, or organism-and-environment, as a unified field or process seems to fit the facts. The sensation of man as an island-ego in a hostile, stupid or indifferent universe seems more of a dangerous hallucination.
A Christianity which is not basically mystical must become either a political ideology or a mindless fundamentalism. This is, indeed, already happening, and it is curious to note that, for lack of the mystical element, both trends fall back on the Bible as their basic inspiration-and it has always struck me that Biblical idolatry is one of the most depressing and sterile fixations of the religious mind.
We now know beyond a doubt that large and widely scattered numbers of otherwise sane and sober people have had experiences of "cosmic consciousness" in which the sense of life becomes perfectly clear. The antagonisms of good and evil, life and death, being and nothing, self and other are felt as the poles of undulations of a single, eternal and harmonious energy-exuding a sense of joy and love. ....it comes upon us with the same startling independence of wishing and willing as a flash of lightning.
In our inevitably clumsy attempts to describe this vision it often seems necessary to say that everything is God....or that you and God are one. At the same time, the experience is somehow a grace: it is given and cannot be evoked by effort of will.\
I now find it easier to assume that Jesus was a man like ourselves who had a spontaneous and overwhelming experience of cosmic consciousness in which it became completely clear to him that "I and the Father are one" and that "before Abraham was, I am". ....It would have been outrageous and criminal blasphemy to come right out and say "I am God". ... But, if we are to believe the Gospel of St John, conviction got the better of tact- for in all those "I am" passages he come out with the simple truth of his experience and was crucified for blasphemy.
...Jesus was not an expert on the history of religion, and probably never met anyone whose mystical vision was as deep as his own. The only religious language available to him was that of the legal and prophetic Hebrew scriptures which, with their image of God as King-Father, do not lend themselves to a mystical interpretation.
The Gospel must therefore be the communication of Jesus' own experience of Godhood. Otherwise Christians put themselves in the absurd situation of reproaching themselves for not following the example of one who had the unique advantage of being God, or at the very least, ""the Boss's son." It is thus that the saving truth of the Gospel appears, not as Jesus' experience of Godhood, but as his punishment for proclaiming it, and that sanctity in the following of Christ is chiefly measured by the degree of guiltiness felt in failing to come up to his example.
Christians dare not believe that ... they have been given the power "to become sons of God", remembering that the expression "sons of" means "of the nature of".
From this point of view it would seen that the Church has rendered the Gospel ineffective by setting Jesus on a pedestal of excessive reverence and making him so unique that he is virtually isolated form the human condition.
Inspiring and worshipful as the character of Jesus may be, it was not what inspired Jesus himself, for he was what he was because he knew of himself that "I and the Father are one", and not-obviously- because he had accepted Jesus as his Saviour.
...the whole point of the Gospel is that everyone may experience union with God in the same way and to the same degree as Jesus himself. On the contrary, one who says, with Eckhart, that "the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me" is condemned as a heretic.
If Christianity cannot be Christianity without pushing the claim to be the best of all possible religions, the world will breathe more freely when it dissolves.
This is really all there is to contemplative mysticism-to be aware without judgement or comment of what is actually happening at this moment, both outside ourselves and within, listening even to our involuntary thoughts as if they were no more than the sound of rain.
