Response from MEH
I found your site while collecting same for a Quaker bookmark. Also, I have a little training in linguistics, a little training in some mahayana Buddhist meditative techniques, and then my own experience, which includes a couple of long seasons alone on a fire tower years ago.
What I'm interested in is what I call the place past words.
Under Effing the Ineffable, are you familiar with the description of his experience from "Black Elk Speaks"?
"Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy."
Maybe this description makes "intuitive sense" to me through the "grid" of my experience alone on a mountain.
QUERY 1:
Have you had unitive experiences?
Think carefully about this, often people have forgotten them.
When have you had your strongest unitive experiences?
Yes, although they have certainly not been of the "engulfed in flame" variety :). When? In solitude.
What were the settings or triggering events?
Settings: Beauty. Night. Quiet. Triggers: When young, Opening to beauty. Older, Opening to my own flaws and failings in acceptance without beating myself up or displacing in "blame" and so experiencing the annihilation of pretense to righteousness while simultaneously discovering I held an abiding well-wish for the well-being of specific others with whom I'd been in great conflict. Whew. The opening is my volition, the rest is like being the crest of a great wave. A beautiful sound. The sense that "I/Everything" be on track and on schedule, a stunning pause while the universe pauses and gives "me" a nod. Maybe how a cell would feel if "I" could acknowlege it's integral necessary appreciated existence? A real (good) shock, the first time especially. Not an experience I can induce, but loosening my death-grip on the notion that "I/ego" exists and is identifiable as separate being clears the way. What Thich Nhat Hahn calls "emptiness". No pretensions to enlightenment here.
What effect did they have on you?
Life forming. While I still experience fear, anger, loathing it becomes harder and harder to hang onto these because I have less and less success in remembering the separateness of the folks whose actions I'm reacting to.
What words would you substitute for unitive experience if this does not characterize your deepest spiritual experiences?
Unitive experience is OK, bit clinical---maybe a small overcompensation for the semantic load associated with "mysticism?"). It's love, but that one's got too much/variable semantic load too, and this love is way big.
QUERY 2:
Where do you agree or disagree with the ideas expressed above? Are there important elements that have been left out?
Language is always such a difficulty. English depends upon distinctions between self and other(subject/object), there is no suitable vocabulary, even "all" implies more than one. Nor is it possible to get away from the tyranny of exclusionary pronouns. This said, I don't think unitive experience depend upon becoming first loving, pure or humble. I don't think unitive experience depend upon any particular effort we make. Which brings me to notions of expressing unitive experience in terms of sensory experience, and image.
Sensory experience is what we've got. This is the vocabulary, because these are the set of built-in tools we've got. Our vocabulary, in any language I'm aware of, is constrained by the parameters of our senses, and utterly depends upon the interlocutors having experience in common. Even the most brilliant use of language will not create in them an experience equivalent to the concrete, direct experience.
Another limitation of language/culture is the cultural grid each of us develops, through both received knowledge and authentic knowledge (direct, concrete experience). Each of us uses this grid continually to organize new experience/information. The terms in which I might describe unitive experience may seem inaccessible, just as the terms Europeans of several centuries ago use seem inaccessible to me. I understand the words, but the images do not resonate for me.
Finally, the notions as stated of immanence and transcendence. This isn't how I use these words, so I was surprised. This is really hard to talk about, so "the Tau I'm talking about isn't the real Tau." In my inarticulate experience it isn't about being in God or God being in me.
It's all God. Dark matter, light matter, the space between, everything/no thing.
Well, that's God, God being: verb, not noun. no nouns, every"thing" is verb, being, and that being is ---you get the idea! Everything is, as Buddhists would say, impermanent--because every"thing" is a dynamic state of being, being expressing dynamic being in mysterious beautiful variety-- When "I" forget "I" all there is perfect presence. Alltogetheratonce. No word for this, complete never finished, one\various (w)holy Great Mystery.
So how come "I" don't forget "I" well enough to stay in unitive experience? But that wasn't one of your questions, and I've talked about what can't be talked about long enough!
QUERY 3:
Do you think these attempts to put the older language about spirituality into contemporary terms are faithful to the concepts they started with?
The concepts seem to be various; the arguments get a bit mind-numbing.
"Unitive experience is not emotion, thought, or psychological pathology."
Does unitive experience include emotion? Thought? If cognitive systems and the complex neurochemical/electric-magnetic structures which mechanically form those systems are excluded, what senses are humans using to have unitive experience, and how do they know they are having one?
As to what is unitive experience what is pathology---I asked a professor of abnormal psychology this question, in regard to vision quest experiences. He told the class this was an area fraught with great difficulty, particularly for psychiatrists/psychologists who do not bring personal or cultural acceptance of the possibility of these experiences being other than fantasies or delusions; that training in scientific method encourages skepticism and lacks training/appreciation of culture-specific mythography/ethnography necessary to have even a clue what the person who had the experience is trying to talk about.
"Certainly, mystical consciousness is to be distinguished from accounts of 'spiritual' experiences that are just more fantasies, more emotion laden dreams of merging and dependency. The blissed out disciple with a fixed smile revolves in a dream as deep as any demagogue caught up in power. . . "
Ah. And the author of this statement may make such judgements about the validity of somebody else's experience (experience we have already established is impossible to convey) because? This same author later refers to "mystical science." All the scientists I know would have judgements of their own about the validity of such terminology.
How do these ideas fit with your own experience and understanding?
Not very well, really. (There's a whole hemisphere with thousands of years of "spirituality" practiced by many millions of people over thousands of years not represented here.) If I understand correctly, western psychology has divvied people up into ego, id and superego. Mushed together, these (dubious) designations are "self"/"I." But egos don't persist, don't go to heaven or reincarnate or whatever. Yet it is the ego forgetting it's sense of separateness in order to have a sense of "union" with Great Mystery, while Great Mystery is Beingeverythingalltogetheratoncepresent, impossible to be separate from!
For me "spiritual practice" doesn't have to do with trying to induce unitive experience or ego-death. It is practice in forgiving (I had never experienced this or seen it clearly modeled, so my first time I bumbled over it. It isn't what I'd been told it is. Which for me underlies moving out of the (received knowledge) tyranny of ego-as-I. Lots of "right brain" activities help because that cognition system is present, simultaneous, spatial and doesn't talk!
I mean no offense, but I suspect part of this forgetting "self" and merging with the all has to do with the alienating nature of many eastern hemisphere cultures. Imagine for a moment a culture in which there are no prisons, no prostitutes, no orphans, and the concept of a child being from conception illegal and shameful is unknown. Imagine that in this culture being born ensures that every child is wanted, cherished, looked after by everybody in the community older than that child. Imagine that in this culture everyone assumes that everything is an equal part of Great Mystery, and that it is the responsibility of each human being to explore being part of Great Mystery in order to help the whole community. Imagine that everybody also assumes this is a natural, on-going response to being alive at all. Nobody talks much about it, everybody just does it. I somehow don't think any preoccupation with separateness would arise.
MHE