Archives: Third Party Stories

Julian of Norwich (1342 – 1413) was an English Christian mystic who lived in solitude in Norwich, England.  She once suffered from a severe illness and, while presumably on her deathbed, she received 16 “showings,” or revelations.  These showings occurred on May 13, 1373, when Julian was 30 and a half years of age.  She wrote about the showings in her book Revelations of Divine Love.  This work is the first published book in the English language to be written by a woman.

In the “long text” of Julian of Norwich’s work, she writes of one of her revelations:

“Greatly ought we to rejoice that God dwells in our soul; and more greatly ought we rejoice that our soul dwells in God….I saw no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God; and still my understanding [from Christian scripture] accepted that our substance is in God, that is to say that God is God, and our substance is a creature of God….[I]t is nothing else than right understanding with true belief and certain trust in our being, that we are in God, and he is in us, which we do not see.”

At the end of her book, Julian of Norwich wrote that, “so truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother…What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing.  Know it well, love was his meaning…Who reveals it to you?  Love.  What did he reveal to you?  Love.  Why does he reveal it to you?  For love.”

Quoted by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh in Julian of Norwich: Showings (Classics of Western Spirituality).

Jordan Paper, Ph.D. (December 3, 1938 – ) is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada, where his academic focus is Religious Studies and East Asian Studies.  Paper taught classes on ecstatic religious experience, and he has written on the topic of mystic experience for more than 30 years.  Among his works are Mystic Experience: A Descriptive and Comparative Analysis and Chinese Way in Religion.

“In 1972 [at the age of 34], the most momentous event of my life took place on a perfect summer day at an ideal summer occasion, a weekend folk music/jazz festival on the beautiful park island that forms the outer boundary of Toronto’s harbor…It was early afternoon and, having finished a light lunch, I lay down alone on the grass under the shade of an old tree….

I was lying on my side and directly in my vision across a sunlit, mown field I perceived an attractive woman.  Without moving my head or eyes, I focused on her, enjoying the vision with little or no thought, save a pleasant erotic feeling.  At first she slowly filled my vision, as if I were floating toward her or her toward me.  Then with increasing speed she came closer and closer, followed by trees, rocks, the field, and then the entire universe, whirling in a giant vortex that funneled into me.  As everything literally became one with me, I perceived a bright light inside rather than outside of me.  This light can best be described as white, but it was all colors simultaneously, and it was bright beyond the brightest light imaginable.  I, the universe, began to fly faster and faster toward the light.  At that moment, I comprehended that I had to make an instantaneous decision:  I could enter the light into which I would merge and be gone or stop and end the experience.  Somehow, I recognized what was happening.  I sped into the light and dissolved in an immense flood tide of joy.

Later – it could have been a quarter of an hour or an hour or more – I regained awareness.  At first I was aware of a blissful nothingness; that is, the first awareness was simply of being aware while awash in the afterglow of bliss.  Then there was an awareness of a somethingness, which I began to perceive as composed of things:  sensations of sights and sounds.  Slowly, these components took on specific qualities, took on names and meanings.  The world was again around me; there was an ‘I’ that was again in a remembered world.  But it was not the same ‘I’ as before.  It was an ‘I’ that knew with absolute certitude that the state of being an ‘I’ was less true than the state of being not ‘I,’ that the only reality is a blissful, utterly undifferentiated nothingness in which there is no ‘I.’”

Paper wrote that about one month before his experience he “had moved to Toronto from a small southern Indiana city…to take up a new university post.  I had gone from an area where I was a despised minority – in several ways – to…one of the finest and most metropolitan cities in the world.  I had left behind a place into which I could not fit, a dead marriage, and a deadening scholarly direction for a vibrant artistic world, new social opportunities, and a return to the only scholarly direction that excited me – religious studies.  I was physically fit…[and] had returned to a semivegetarian diet.  I had no emotional entanglements.  I had not yet begun to teach or do research…It was a still point in my life.  Perhaps a pleasant, positive, vacuous life is conducive to an experience of the void.”

Quoted from The Mystic Experience: A Descriptive and Comparative Analysis by Jordan Paper.

Photo Credit: Jordan Paper from www.yorku.ca.

Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944) was a French writer, art historian, and mystic who was deeply involved with the search for world peace.  Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 “as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings.”

Romain Rolland describes his mystical experiences as follows:

“I had, between the ages of 15 and 20…several brief and staggering contacts with the Unity.  These obscure illuminations were the key to the spiritual world in which I lived for the next 40 years.  I passionately explored this world among the trials and torments of my life of flesh and blood, here and there visited by new revelations…”

In Rolland’s autobiography, Journey Within, he explains that his first mystical experience occurred during the summer of 1882 at Ferney, which had been home to the philosopher Voltaire for many years.  Upon exiting Voltaire’s home, Rolland looked at the landscape before him and “the thunder roared”:

“I see! At last I see! What did I see?…it was like the rending of a veil.  [My] spirit, a desecrated virgin unfolding under the embrace, felt stirring within it the virile ecstasy of nature….suddenly everything took on meaning;  everything was explained.  And in that moment, when I beheld Nature in all her nakedness, and went in to her, I loved her…”

While reading the philosopher Spinoza during the winter of 1885-1886 – in preparation for his entrance exams to the Ecole Normale Superieure, which he later attended – Rolland found that “one page was enough” to cause “sparks of fire.”  He realized that God and nature are one and that “Everything that is, exists in God….And I too am in God!…I can fall only in him.  I am at peace; all is peace…At bottom, each mind and what is convenient to call nature share the same reality, have the same origin, are the issue of the same cosmic energy.”

Quoted by William B. Parsons in The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling:  Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism.

Claire Boothe Luce (March 10, 1903 – October 9, 1987) was a novelist, playwright, politician, diplomat, and advisor to Presidents. In 1953, Luce became the first American woman appointed to a major ambassadorial post abroad – U.S. Ambassador to Italy (she later became U.S. Ambassador to Brazil as well). In 1983 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was the first female member of Congress to receive the medal.

“[My experience] occurred when I was perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old…it was a summer day on an American beach…[in the] early morning…

I remember that it was a cool, clean, fresh, calm, blue, radiant day, and that I stood by the shore, my feet not in the waves.  And now – as then – I find it difficult to explain what did happen.  I expect that the easiest thing is to say that suddenly SOMETHING WAS.  My whole soul was left clean by it, as a silk veil slit by a shining sword.  And I knew.  I do not know what I knew.  I remember, I didn’t even know then. That is, I didn’t know with any “faculty.”  It was not in my mind or heart or bloodstream.  But whatever it was I knew, it was something that made ENORMOUS SENSE.  And it was final.  And yet, that word could not be used, for it meant end, and there was no end to this finality.  The joy abounded in all of me.  Or rather, I abounded in joy.  I seemed to have no nature, and yet my whole nature was adrift in this immense joy, as a speck of dust is seen to dance in a great golden shaft of sunlight.

I don’t know how long this experience lasted.  It was, I should think, closer to a second than to an hour – though it might have been either…[Years later] I knew it had been, somehow, the most real experience of my whole life.”

Quoted by John A. O’Brien in The Road to Damascus.

Zhūangzi (~369 BC – ~286 BC), literally Master Zhuang, also known as Chuang Tzu, was a Taoist Chinese philosopher and writer. The Zhuangzi book, attributed to Master Zhuang, contains stories and anecdotes that exemplify the carefree nature of the ideal Taoist sage. The Zhuangzi is one of the three foundational texts of Taoism, along with the Tao Te Ching and the Lieh Tzu.

In The Zhuangzi book, Master Zhuang refers to a Taoist teacher, Nu Chu, who helped a disciple to achieve a mystical experience through “tso-wang” (“sitting with blank mind”). Master Zhuang referred to the mystical experience of the disciple (a description that presumably fits his experience) as follows:

“Being in a state of illumination, he was able to gain the vision of the One (or ‘That which is unique’). Being able to see the One, he was able to transcend the distinction of past and present; having transcended the distinction of past and present, he was able to enter the realm where life and death are no more [i.e., to enter into Eternity].”

Union with the Infinite and the Eternal was the goal of Master Zhuang. To achieve his mystical consciousness, Master Zhuang sought to identify himself with “Infinity-Eternity” in order to become one with the “great Interpenetration.”

Zhūangzi stated about his mystical experience: “The heavens and the earth and I have come into existence together, and all creation and I are one.”

Quoted by Sidney Spencer from Mysticism in World Religion.

Abraham Abulafia (1240 – 1291) was a Jewish mystic, philosopher, and writer. He was the founder of the school of “Prophetic Kabbalah.”  Abulafia wrote poems, treatises on grammar, and books, including his influential handbooks that teach one how to achieve the prophetic experience [Abulafia’s term for mystical experience]: Chayei ha-Olam ha-Ba, Or ha-Sekhel, Sefer ha-Cheshek, and Imrei Shefer.

In teaching others through his handbooks how to achieve mystical experience, Abulafia presumably described his experience.  One of Abulafia’s texts explains how the mystic and The Divine join and how the mystic becomes part of the “I” of God:

“If the mystic has felt the divine touch and perceived its nature…his name is like the Name of his Master [God]….For now he is no longer separated from his master, and behold he is his master and his master is he; for he is so intimately adhering to God [here the term devekut is used] that he cannot by any means be separated from him, for he is He.  And just as his Master, who is detached from all matter is called…the knowledge, the knower, and the known, all at the same time, since all three are one in God:  so shall he, the exalted individual, the master of the exalted Name [of God], be called intellect, while he is actually knowing; then he is also the known, like his master, and then there is no difference between them.”

Quoted by Byron L. Sherwin from Kabbalah:  An Introduction to Jewish Mysticism.

Photo Credit: Abraham Abulafia from foto-sinta-se.blogspot.com.

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. His numerous works include “Experiences nouvelles touchant le vide,” “Traité du triangle arithmétique,” and “De l’Esprit géométrique.”

Pascal recorded his mystical experience on a scrap of paper which was found sewn up in his doublet after his death.

“From about half past ten in the evening to about half an hour after midnight.
Fire.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,
Not the God of philosophers and scholars.
Absolute Certainty: Beyond reason. Joy. Peace.
Forgetfulness of the world and everything but God.
The world has not known thee, but I have known thee.
Joy! joy! joy! Tears of joy!”

Quoted by F.C. Happold from Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology.

Meister Eckhart (1260 – 1328) was a Catholic German theologian, philosopher, author, and mystic. Eckhart came into prominence during the Avignon Papacy, at a time of increased tensions between the Franciscan Order and Eckhart’s Dominican Order of Preachers. He once stated that, “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.” In later life, Eckhart was accused of heresy, brought up before the local Franciscan-led Inquisition, and tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII.

Eckhart described one of his mystical experiences as follows:

“When I came out from God, that is, into multiplicity, then all proclaimed ‘There is a God’ [i.e. the personal God, Creator of all things]. Now this cannot make me blessed, for hereby I realize myself as creature. But in the breaking through [i.e. through all limitations], I am more than all creatures, I am neither God nor creature; I am that which I was and shall remain evermore. There I receive a thrust which carries me above all angels. By this sudden touch I am become so rich that God [i.e. God as opposed to the Godhead – the essential being of God] is not sufficient for me, so far as he is only God and in all his divine works. For in this breaking through I perceive what God and I are in common. There I am what I was. There I neither increase nor decrease. For there I am the immovable which moves all things. Here man has won against what he is eternally [i.e. in his essential being] and ever shall be. Here God [i.e. the Godhead] is received into the soul.”

Quoted by Rudolf Otto in Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism.

John Addington Symonds (October 5, 1840 – April 19, 1893) was an English poet, cultural historian, and literary critic. His numerous works include: Introduction to the Study of Dante, A Problem in Greek Ethics, and Walt Whitman. A Study.

Symonds account of his mystical consciousness is as follows:

“Suddenly, at church, or in company, or when I was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from an anesthetic influence. One reason why I disliked this kind of trance was that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract Self. The universe became without form and void of content. But Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness…

This trance recurred with diminishing frequency until I reached the age of twenty-eight. It served to impress upon my growing nature the phantasmal unreality of all the circumstances which contribute to a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often have I asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of denuded, keenly sentient being, Which is the unreality? – the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner Self and build a self of flesh-and-blood conventiality?”

Quoted by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Ramakrishna (February 18, 1836 – August 16, 1886) was a famous mystic of 19th-century India. He emphasized God-realization as the supreme goal of all living beings. Ramakrishna’s religious school of thought, Vedanta (based on the Vedas, the sacred scriptures of India) led to the formation of the Ramakrishna Mission by his chief disciple, Swami Vivekananda. In addition to Vedanta, Ramakrishna also practiced other religions — notably Islam and Christianity — and said that all religions lead to the same God.

The most well known book about Ramakrishna is Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita by Mahendranath Gupta (“M”).  The book was translated to English by Swami Nikhilananda and entitled The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.  The text, first published in 1942, records conversations that Ramakrishna had with his disciples, devotees, and visitors.

Ramakrishna was at one time the priest of a temple of Kali, the Divine Mother. His unorthodox actions caused the temple authorities frequent embarrassment. On one occasion, he fed food, reserved as an offering to Kali, to a certain cat. Ramakrishna defended this decision by stating:

“The Divine Mother revealed to me that…it was she who had become everything…that everything was full of consciousness…I found everything in the room soaked as it were in bliss – the bliss of God….That was why I fed a cat with the food that was to be offered to the Divine Mother. I clearly perceived that all this was the Divine Mother – even the cat.”

On another occasion, Ramakrishna declared:

“When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive – neither creating, nor preserving, nor destroying – I call him Brahman…the Impersonal God. When I think of him as active – creating, preserving, destroying – I call him Sakti, or Maya, or Prakriti, the Personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The Personal God and the Impersonal God are the same thing….It is impossible to conceive one without the other.”

Quoted by W.T. Stace in Mysticism and Philosophy.