Monday, July 16, 2012

Mystic and mystification

Magritte's Painting: "The False Mirror"
In our dark times many fans to make itself more significant readily pass themselves off as mystics, and frequently they express mystical pretensions.
In select, the "esoteric" circles they speak much on mystical themes, they employ mystical terminology, but they speak in too artificial a fashion, they display too egoistical an attitude. It becomes strange, when one ceases really to differentiate mystical words from mystical activity, when one fails to distinguish imitation from being, the refined materialists from the genuine mystics, when everything is veiled over by a cloud, when the foggy mist of household magic and fashion is passed off as mysticism. In the new-agers experiences, the person is disintegrated into momentary instants, impressions, fragmented conditions, with the loss of the centre for the person and its own organic connections to life.
The new-ager's world-perception jumbles together the "I" with the "not-I", it mixes together that, which is, with that, which is not. Often people fond of modern mystifications are as it were afraid of real encounters, they want to reserve for themselves the possibility to say, what is not reality, what is nothing, they have an aversion towards a connectedness with anything real. The mystifier experiencings too much reckon upon the possibility of enlarging the extent of the person, by an acknowledging of illusory being, having abolished all  the boundaries of the fictitious but not of the real, surmounting these limits in a transient mindset and word, but not in an eternal actuality. These people have hopelessly confused mysticism with a psychological subtlety of refinement, with the discovering of new empirical states, and upon this jumbled confusion they have based their mystical pretensions. Probably they have ceased to be able to differentiate the light of the moon from the billboard lighting. 
We all make mistakes, and there is no resumption that we are responsible when we do. But self-deception is a peculiar kind of mistake, for which the victim must bear much of the responsibility.
Perhaps she is the innocent victim of deception, but by the same token, she is also the guilty perpetrator of falsehoods. The mystic Abu Bakr has perfectly taught that: “the spiritual warrior has no outside enemies.”
It is impossible to confuse the mystically real with a mere experience, with a testing of factual conditions, with a subjective given. The most vivid, the most powerful, the most irrational experience is still not reality and is still not mysticism. While there are numerous paths in both the East and the West that one may follow in order to attain this union with God, in essence all true paths are similar. The paths of mysticism differ solely in their form, not in their goals.

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