Quotes About Mysticism

How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all. I remember how learnedly and enthusiastically I could talk for hours about mysticism and the experimental knowledge of God, and all the while I was stoking the fires of the argument with Scotch and soda.

All one night we sat, with a friend of his, in a big dark roadhouse outside of Philadelphia, arguing and arguing about mysticism, and smoking more and more cigarettes and gradually getting drunk. Eventually, filled with enthusiasm for the purity of heart which begets the vision of God, I went on with them into the city, after the closing of the bars, to a big speak-easy where we completed the work of getting plastered.

Suzuki also frequently quotes a sentence of Eckhart's: "The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me" (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 50) as an exact expression of what Zen means by Prajna.

Aye, some of us have never seen him, only heard his steps on the nights when there is no Moon, or his voice, speaking from above the only words he knows,— 'Eyeh asher Eyeh,' "—in on which, in Tones hush'd, though ominous, the others now join. "That is, 'I am that which I am,'" helpfully translates a somehow nautical-looking Indiv. with gigantick Fore-Arms, and one Eye ever a-Squint from the Smoke of his Pipe.

I see science and mysticism as two complementary manifestations of the human mind; as its rational and intuitive faculties. Capra

Power lived everywhere, beneath cactus thorns, secreted in sparkles of dew, and hidden in the flecks of moonlight that silvered the sage. By calling upon that Power, Singers could pull clouds together and awaken the soaring

terms tend to become dead counters in a futile, spiritually obstructive semantic game, for they describe mystic experience that cannot be exposed to the common light of day without devaluation and dilution of meaning.

As Catholic mystic Thomas Merton observed, "Everything that is, is holy." To see the truth of this statement is the beginning of an abundant life.

I am accused of mysticism. I do not, however, hold myself responsible for the fact that man has, everywhere and always, spontaneously developed religious forms of expression, and that the human psyche from time immemorial has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. Whoever cannot see this aspect of the human psyche is blind, and whoever chooses to explain it away, or to "enlighten" it away, has no sense of reality.

Tibetan Book of the Dead

In our Western civilization the Cosmic Man has been identified to a great extent with Christ, and in the East with Krishna or with Buddha. In the Old Testament this same symbolic figure turns up as the "Son of Man" and in later Jewish mysticism is called Adam Kadmon. Certain religious movements of late antiquity simply called him Anthropos (the Greek word for man). Like all symbols this image points to an unknowable secret—to the ultimate unknown meaning of human existence.

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide to contemplative prayer. "Be willing to be blind, and give up all longing to know the why and how, for knowing will be more of a hindrance than a help." This 1912 edition was edited by Evelyn Underhill, and contains her introduction.

This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as he has commanded us" (1 Jn. 4:7). "If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us" (1 Jn. 4:12). This verse suggests that the "Johannine mysticism" is a mysticism of love.

You underestimate the depths to which mysticism can bury rationality, Golan.

Misfortune draws people to religion and mysticism

Atheism is a sort of crippled mysticism, [...] Blind nature has created all that we see, as well as all that we do not see - that's a mystical notion.

A God-intoxicated man.

Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions.

Where the ordinary mind sees disaster and confusion, the mind of the philosopher sees the most perfect sequence of cause and effect, and where the materialist sees nothing but endless death, the mystic sees pulsating and eternal life.

Mysticism is the function of a mind looking for alternatives to reality.

To Hubbert, this kind of thinking was sheer mysticism. Earth, being finite, contains a finite number of hydrocarbon molecules in a finite set of locations. Supplies are therefore limited

the first law of demonology is that if you can see it, it can see you. But

Eastern mysticism embraced both the tangible and the intangible, through the yin and yang of duality. The god Shiva was both the creator and the destroyer of worlds; indeed, one aspect of the deity Nishkala Shiva was the Shiva "without parts"—the void. Through their ability to divorce numerals from physical reality, the Indians invented algebra.

I think there are so many misconceptions about mediums.