Todd Shy at The Point:
The last thing we should want to do with accounts of mystical or transcendent or contemplative experiences is send them to the taxidermist and mount them for inspection. First we should watch them fly and roam, try to see what they see, and see what’s interesting about them. We may need different binoculars than we’re used to.
That’s what explorers of those perspectives tell us, anyway. Here is Simon Critchley in his recent study Mysticism: “Reading [Meister] Eckhart is a question of allowing the movement of his thinking to have an effect on you, an effect which is not reducible to an act of understanding.” Stanley Cavell struck a similar note in older reflections on Thoreau: “What is the sense that something escapes the conditions of knowledge? It is, I think, the sense, or fact, that our primary relation to the world is not one of knowing it.” In his recent book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, James K.A. Smith quotes Teresa of Ávila: “These are the souls who apply the discursive mind to their meditations. This is all they have.”
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.