On the Trail of Bliss
So I’m reading Mysticism, Sacred and Profane by Robert Charles Zaehner, trying to figure out mysticism in general relates to beatitudo, the Aquinas version of happiness.
Zaeher says there’s three types of mystical experiences, all of which involve a transcending of time and space in which an infinite mode of existence is actually experienced. The person who has had the experience feels it was “something of tremendous significance beside which the ordinary world is a shadow of a shadow. The experience seems overwhelmingly real; its authority will not be denied.”
The first is Nature mysticism: you lose yourself in nature and actually become it; you become the thing you’re looking at. You and the world become one; “Your Not-self becomes the thing’s Not-self.”
The second is Monist mysticism, where instead of losing yourself in nature you lose yourself in yourself. The outside world has no true existence in and of itself; the soul is isolated from all that is not itself.
In both of these types of mysticism, the result is a oneness, either with nature where the self disappears, or with the self where nature disappears.
In the third type of mysticism, which Zaehner calls Theistic mysticism, the end-point is different. Instead of one entity (either nature or the soul), there are two entities, you and God, and there is love. In this type of mysticism, the soul remains a distinct entity and feels itself united to God by love. So instead of one, we have three: God, soul, and love.
Hmmm. Beginning to sound familiar: God, consciousness, love, as in the Augustine / Aquinas concept of the Trinity. Or as in the Hindu concept Sat-cit-ananda, which means existence, consciousness, and bliss. (Per wikipedia, the expression is used in yoga and other schools of Indian philosophy to describe the nature of Brahman as experienced by a fully liberated yogi.). Or as Zaehner says, “The mystic is engaged in realizing himself as his own final cause. To reunite with him in that particular mode of love which only a creature can have for its creator. One liberated while still alive, in a state of beatitude.”
Maybe Christians didn’t invent the Trinity after all.
