Women and men of the new millennium will be mystics or will not be (at all).
Rob Moore (September 2001)

(Much of the thinking in this article has its origins in Willigis Jager's book, Search for the Meaning of Life: Essays and reflections on the Mystical Life, Ligouri, 1995).

Karl Rahner’s observation paraphrased above says “all' women and men. I’ve only recently realised that Rahner wasn’t saying Christian women and men but rather every woman and man of the future will be a mystic, or will not be. What does this mean? Willigis Jager in his book Search for Meaning expresses again something I heard Richard Rohr say in one of his lectures in Canberra in 2000, namely “humanity has again arrived at the end of one of its evolutionary epochs, in this case the mental phase”. Albert Einstein speaks profoundly of this in his famous quotation (again paraphrased)  “no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it” which is so appropriate for our times, especially following the events of September 11 in America. Many are now saying (Jager and Rohr included) that our survival is bound up with our success or failure to take the leap to the level of consciousness.

Our Churches are in a round about way saying the same thing. Isn’t it interesting that so many of the mystics (eg. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila) in their time were treated with great suspicion, often persecuted and John of the Cross was even imprisoned by his brother monks. The same Church in our times now proclaims them saints and Doctors of the Church. At the same time, young people are showing themselves much more open and gifted for the mystical path; sadly many of the older generations who hold power within the churches and society aren’t similarly disposed!

What does it mean that “all women and men (of all religions) will be mystics?” The answer can be found in exploring the tension between esotericism and exotericism, a tension I have grappled with since starting my course here several years ago. In  assessment tasks I was asked what others reasoned about our Faith; I wanted desperately alas to write about my experience of God.

Esotericism is spirituality oriented towards experience and sees as its goal the meaning of religion. The esotericist is not a person with some sort of elitist consciousness but someone who has started off on the path to experience the Divine in himself or herself and in all things.

Exotericism is a spirituality based on scriptures, dogmas, ritual, and/or symbolism.

Esotericism leads to Exotericism (consider our Christian origins).

So what’s this got to do with Rahner’s seemingly extraordinary statement? How can all regardless of Creed be mystic if we all believe different things, even within Christianity. The answer is that the crucial difference between religions is not so much the boundaries  separating individual faiths (eg. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism) but rather the difference between esoteric and exoteric spirituality.

Consider the following diagram (Jager, Search for the Meaning of Life, p.73):

Jager suggests the fundamental difference between religions is not in their doctrines and rituals but between their manifest esoteric and exoteric spiritualities; the dividing line runs horizontally not vertically.

 The Ultimate Reality, variously named by religions as the Absolute, Godhead, the Tao, Sunyata and Nirvana, defies every kind of naming or visualisation through reason or the senses. The attempt to give it a name that everyone can accept is what divides the religions, and as history has shown, especially today, what has lead to wars of religion, persecution, defamation, and disparagement. Thankfully today religions are being recognised for what they are, paths on which individuals should be led back to their origins, what we call our deepest essence or the Divine within us and within everything that exists.

Mystics are esotericists; that is why they are often criticised as being anti-irrational and arrogantly “enlightened”. Exotericists (includes fundamentalists) cannot understand this because the concept is not intellectually graspable. Esotericists by contrast have no problems with religious formulas because the formulas aren’t to them absolute. Over the course of history then mysticism has had a two-sidedness: it can effectively support dogmas or it can undermine them. Esotericists have suffered for this and in most religions have not just been excommunicated but often they are thrown into prison or even burned at the stake.

Exotericists are afraid of betraying the truth of their religious beliefs. Since their faith is lodged in an altogether special credal statement, they find it hard to accept that truth is to be found in other religions as well, especially as their religious security is grounded precisely in the differences between their own and other religions. Surely this is the root of all religious differences (and their terrible consequences) in our world today!

Jager provides a powerful alternative image of religion:

 “Religion maybe compared to a glass window. It remains dark unless it is lit from behind. The light itself is not visible but in the window of religion it takes on a structure and becomes comprehensible to everyone. Although religion tends to bind its followers to the structure of the window, the ultimate thing is not the window but the light that shines behind it. Only those who see the light of God behind all the structures can realise the meaning and goal of religion. The danger is that the symbols and images of God will obscure rather than illuminate the reality they are supposed to shed light on.”

 We must beware however the risk of believing esotericism could subsist all by itself. Religion needs the two pillars of esotericism and exotericism otherwise it fails to reach its goal. Esotericists too have found the way to mystical experience by means of religion. They will never reject religion but they clearly recognise the one-sidedness that every formulation brings with it. Humans are creatures of mind-and-body, and so they need religion as a profession of faith and they need language as a means of expressing themselves. But true religion to lead its adherents beyond itself to the experience of the Divine.

 Esotericism then is not primarily concerned with elevating the mind to a level of experience on which it forgets all its earthly ties. Rather it aims to bring about a sharp-eyed vision that lays aside all egocentricity and allows us to grasp the world in its “thusness”. This tension often referred to as the tension of opposites is expressed in a wonderful, ancient symbol :

 This ancient mandala known in both the East and West clearly expresses the standpoint of the mystic: two overlapping circles. Christians call this the Mandorla which is the Italian word for almond (see Robert Johnson’s Owning your own shadow and www.sandplay.org/mandorla.html). The Icythus symbol we associate with Christianity has its origins in the Mandorla. In Romanesque times, Jesus is represented by these two circles just as the Sakayama Buddha is in Buddhist art. The Mandorla is now thought to be older than both religions. It designates the supernatural and the natural, mind and matter, heaven and earth, ego and shadow, and especially the Divine and the human. In the area where the two circles overlap sits the God-man, a place I believe we too are called to be, where both aspects of reality coincide and become one.

 “In Jesus becoming human we now possess the potential to become Divine”. 

 The Mandorla then designates the union of apparent opposites that mystics speak of. Our ego-consciousness divides reality into subject and object, whereas out true self experiences unity and harmony; Merton speaks much about this (see The New Man). In the Mandorla both aspects coincide. Nicola of Cusa writes:

"I have found the place where one can find Thee undisguised. It is surrounded by the coincidence of opposites. This is the wall of Paradise in which Thou dwellest. Its gate is guarded by the “highest spirit of reason”. Unless one overcomes it, the entrance will not open. On the other side of the wall of the coincidence of opposites one can see Thee, on this side never." (Jager p.77)

Esotericism then means not exiting from the world. On the contrary it sees the world and reality as they are, not as our reason and senses deceptively present them. The process of human maturation consists of making these two circles more and more coincident. Esotericism and exotericism belong together. This what Jesus means when He says “whoever has seen me has seen the Father”. 

Esotericism is concerned with a new experiencing and grasping of reality and the path that leads not out of this world but into the heart of the moment, into life. The point is not to feel contempt for this world but a new entirely new form of love for it. And with that we come to the essence of mysticism in both East and West: religion is life and life is religion.

Jung reduced the whole problem of esotericism and exotericism to a simple common denominator. For him mysticism was not a matter of faith but of experience. He writes: 

“Religious experience is absolute, it can’t be discussed. One can only say that one has never had such an experience. Then one’s opponent will say, ‘sorry, but I have’ thereby ending the discussion. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks about religious experience: the person who has it possesses the greatest treasure of a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty and that has given the world and the human race a new brightness”.

Back to our starting point: all women and men (of all religions) will be mystics? Do all religions have esoteric paths (ie mystical traditions) and mystics. Yes they do! You are well aware of the origins of the Enneagram, a powerful personality typing tool in Sufism but it wasn’t that well known to me that Sufism was the mystical (esoteric) branch of Islam. Just about all religions have a mystical tradition; I have listed the major religions and some of their mystical traditions below:

I would have liked to take the opportunity to describe each of the mystical traditions but time doesn’t allow for that. I’d like to dwell briefly on the Islamic mystical tradition, Sufism (Tasawouf).

Tasawouf or Sufism, the esoteric school of Islam, was founded on the pursuit of the spiritual understanding of reality as it really is. When speaking of understanding Sufism refers to self-understanding that leads to the understanding of the Divine (It is no wonder that the very popular Enneagram has its origins in Sufism). As the prophet Mohammad is commonly quoted: “Whoever knows oneself, knows the Lord”.

The origins of Sufism reach back to a group of scholars in the time of the Prophet Mohammad fifteen centuries ago, the “ahle suffe”, the people of the platform, named because of their practice of sitting at the platform of the mosque where the Prophet prayed in Medina. They engaged in discussions concerning the reality of Being, the inner heart and in search of the inner path; in doing so they devoted themselves to spiritual purification and meditation. Famous among them were Salman Farsi, Ammar Yasser, Balla’al, Abdullah Masoud and Oveyse Gharani.

After the death of the Prophet, these men returned to their homelands and became the became great missionaries of Islam. Within a few centuries their thinking was introduced to such diverse countries as Persia, India, Indonesia, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia and North Africa where different schools and orders of Sufism developed. Their teachings were based on individual understanding and direct experience. In this manner, their fundamental teachings have been preserved up to the present. 

The “ahle suffe” believed that it was a unique human right and privilege to be able to find the way towards understanding the reality of the Divine. As the cognitive tools (sound familiar?) of ordinary mental logic are limited in their ability to comprehend such a great and all-embracing subject, they found all discussions based on language alone could not open an understanding of such a reality. Thus the path of Sufis was separate from the traditional, orthodox understanding. The Sufis became the people of the tarigb, or the way, and their particular goal was to understand and introduce the esoteric aspects of Islam, as opposed to the exoteric public elements of this universal religion.

Theories regarding the origin of the word Sufi are many and varied and range from a derivative the word ‘suf’ meaning wool, the common fabric early Sufis wore, to an ancient people, the “sufe”, who existed before the prophet and practiced self denial. All explanations though are problematic and no one origin is generally accepted.

The origin of the word Tasawouf however is better understood and attributed to a cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, Imam Ali, said to be the first man to believe in Islam. To the Moslems, he is the King of believers; to Sufis, he is called the Valli, the Guide. Sufism is best described by this mysterious teacher who said Sufism (pronounced Tasawouf) is an acronym of the four letters with which it is spelt: TSVF. Each letter holds a secret representing one stage or quality of a Sufi, one who perfects these principles:

T, the first letter, stands for three practices:

i.                     Tark – abandonment

ii.                   Tubeh – repentance

iii.                  Tugha – virtue

 S stands for three qualities to be perfected by the salek (seeker):

i.                     Sabr – patience

ii.                   Sedgh – truthfulness and honesty

iii.                  Safa – purity

V stands for:

i.                     Vud – love

ii.                   Verd – remembrance

iii.                  Vafa’a – faithfulness

F, the final letter, represents another three qualifications:

i.                     Fard – solitude

ii.                   Fagr – poverty

iii.                  Fana – annihilation

Sufism believes that without mastering these twelve principles, the seeker will not find understanding. Significantly, each stage opens a new door (a progression through rooms as it were not unlike Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle) to the eternal graceful knowledge expressed in this saying. Each principle directs the individual towards the path of recognition of the essence, wonderfully expressed in this Sufi saying:

 "When the curtain of illusion fell there was only One, no one but God".

Like Christian mysticism, Sufism has its saints. One of these was Jalal Al-din Rumi (1207-1273). Rumi, the son of a Sufi preacher, was born in the thirteenth century in Persia in an area that is today a part of Afghanistan. Rumi’s vast collection of mystical poetry has brought him recognition as one of the greatest literary and spiritual figures of all time. Rumi is best known for the Masnavi and Divan-i Shams works of poetry. The first is an epic narrative poem of 25,000 rhyming couplets written in Persian over the last 15 years of his life; the latter comprises the remainder of Rumi’s poems amounting to 35,000 or more verses of shorter lyric poetry. The Masnavi, referred to as the Persian Qur’an, is widely regarded as the greatest spiritual masterpiece ever written.

To conclude, I would like to quote from some of Rumi’s work; it would be hard to distinguish in form and content from any of the Christian mystical works we are more familiar with. 

A lover never seeks without being sought by his beloved.
When the lightning bolt of love has pierced this heart,
be assured that there is love in that heart.
When the love of God grows in your heart, 
beyond any doubt God loves you. (Masnavi III:4393-6)

Our desire for God is fanned by His love: it is His attraction that draws all wayfarers along the path. 
Does dust rise up without a wind? Does a ship float without the sea?  (Masnavi V:4216-17)

For the lovers of God, He alone is the source of all joy and sorrow. 
He alone is the true object of desire; every other kind of love is idle infatuation. 
Love for God is that flame which, when it blazes, burns away everything that is 
not God. Love for God is a sword which cuts down all that is not of God. God 
alone is eternal; all else will vanish. (Masnavi I:3605-7)

Rob Moore
October 2001

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