MYSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY

What if the teachings of Jesus have more to do with mindfulness than atonement? 

What if his teachings direct us towards the “eternal present” more than an eternal future?

The word “Christian” has come to be associated with social and political forms of intolerance, making it more difficult to self-identify as a Christian.  But the intolerance that has become synonymous with Christianity in America's culture wars runs directly contrary to what Jesus taught and lived.  Recently, I was reading some writings from the Desert Fathers, a group of mystic monks from around the third century CE.  I was struck by how frequently they emphasized seeing only good in others: 

"The brothers (students) said, "If a man attains to purity of heart what is the sign thereof? And when will he know himself if the heart is coming to purity?" 

The old man (teacher) said, "When he sees that all men are fair, and when no man appears to him to be unclean or polluted; whosoever is thus indeed stands in purity. ...He whose eyes are pure sees not wickedness.''  

Christianity starts with the word "Christ," but to understand Christ as the Son entails understanding what "God" as Father means. If our understanding of "God" as Father is misguided, then we're near certain to misunderstand what a Son represents. Fortunately, Exodus 3:14 provides the definitive Abrahamic account of God’s self description: ”I am that I am."  A self-reference paradox that is tautological in structure.  It is the stuff of Gödel and Wittgenstein. Jewish tradition is surprisingly quiet on what this means, but we can gather clues from various places. We can glean additional context from Genesis 1:26-27, where it says humanity is made in the "image" of God. Imago dei. 

I would suggest that what unites "I am that I am" and the "image of God" re-presented in humanity is the experience of self-awareness. A self that is aware of itself as a self, and in some sense, creates itself through self-representation to itself. This is, after all, the very nature of human experience. I contend that this idea can be found in the writings of many Christian mystics.

Dionysius the Areogapite writes: 

"...there is but One Simple Power Which of Itself moveth all things to be mingled in an unity, starting from the Good (i.e. "God," the "super-essential Essence," the "Ineffable," "Nameless," ... Dionysius uses many labels) and going unto the lowest of the creatures and thence again returning through all stages in due order unto the Good, and thus revolving from Itself, and through Itself and upon Itself and towards Itself, in an unceasing orbit.”

St Teresa could not distinguish between herself and God while in the state of rapture.  She writes: 

"As far as I can understand, the door of entry into this castle is prayer and meditation... the senses and all external things seem gradually to lose their hold on him, while the soul, on the other hand, regains its lost control. It is sometimes said that the soul enters within itself and sometimes that it rises above itself... This is a good habit and an excellent kind of meditation, for it is founded upon a truth—namely, that God is within us."

St John of the Cross says that “the soul seems to be God rather than itself, and indeed is God by participation.”

The idea embedded in mysticism across religions is that the search for God is best understood as oriented inwards, towards self-awareness. To "know thyself," in a sense.  Terms like "salvation" and "eternal life" become oriented towards our present interior, not an indefinite future in time. The entire enterprise of "spirituality" can be understood as pertaining to this way of seeing the world. 

The 13-14th century Catholic mystic Meister Eckhart writes: 

"Three things hinder us from hearing the everlasting Word. The first is fleshliness, the second is distraction, the third is the illusion of time."  

These three things sound more like Buddhist fetters than Christian hinderances. The "everlasting Word" calls to mind the eternal Logos of John 1, the logos through which the Ineffable becomes articulated, creating and partaking in creation. The three "hinderances" listed by Eckhart resonate with ideas from other contemplative traditions. Fleshliness seems synonymous with worldliness; chasing material gratification and ascribing ultimate meaning to the trivial narratives of our egoic existence. The second, distraction, suggests the all-too-normal tendency to get pulled into narrative loops, and forget the awareness of Awareness itself.  The third hinderance, "the illusion of time" is as overtly mystical as Eckhart gets. It the illusion of time as ultimately 'real' that compels us towards the first two hinderances in the first place.

As someone raised on a fairly literalist brand of Protestantism, Eckhart's analysis would have been shocking (and probably heretical) to me 15 years ago. Didn't Jesus die to atone for the sins of humanity? Isn't there a future resurrection, and afterlife in Heaven? I don't think so anymore. Honestly, I don't think Christianity is about any of those things. At all. I think that what Christianity calls "salvation" and Jesus called the "Kingdom of God/Heaven" is best understood as something akin to Awakening. It is a way to see the world that entails a way to act in relation to the world ("by their fruits you shall know," as Jesus put it). 

I think using "mystical experience" is a fair landmark when describing what this "spiritual" way of "seeing" the world looks like and feels like. I think this way of seeing the world is what Jesus means by having "eyes to see" in Mark 8. By interpreting "God" as oriented towards our inner Awareness rather than something metaphysical "out there," meaning transforms throughout the Bible. The descriptions of mystical experience in the video below really resonates with my personal experience (though I can't vouch for the speaker as any kind of authority). I suspect this way of "seeing" the world is becoming exponentially more common as these once-esoteric teachings have become increasingly common.

What if believe the "Kingdom of God" that Jesus pointed towards was more like this way of seeing the world than an afterlife future in "heaven"?  

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits."

What if this the "eternal life" of Christianity?  

How would it change your conception of Christianity?