#mysticism

The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind. ↗

— Peter Rollins

#religion #spirituality #religion

For glory befits God because of His majesty,while lowliness befits man because it unites us with God. ↗

— St. Diadochos

#humility #mysticism #religion #religion

God created hand, head, and heart; the hand for the deed, the head for the world, the heart for mysticism. ↗

— Abraham Kuyper

#god #intellect #mysticism #religion #soul

the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#mysticism #religion #symbol #religion

But personally, I think [sainthood] is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one's god. ↗

— Lois McMaster Bujold

#religion #saints #religion

Lacan’s defenders (as well as those of the other authors discussed here) tend to respond to these criticisms by resorting to a strategy that we shall call “neither/nor”: these writings should be evaluated neither as science, nor as philosophy, nor as poetry, nor ... One is then faced with what could be called a “secular mysticism”: mysticism because the discourse aims at producing mental effects that are not purely aesthetic, but without addressing itself to reason; secular because the cultural references (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, mathematics, contemporary literature ... ) have nothing to do with traditional religions and are attractive to the modern reader. ↗

— Alan Sokal

#mysticism #postmodernism #poststructuralism #religion

No non-poetic account of reality can be complete. ↗

— John Myhill

#god-s-whisper-creation-s-thunder #john-d-barrow #john-myhill #metaphysics #mysticism

I am that is, my sword shall wield for me. ↗

— Brian Jacques

#mysticism

In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical. ↗

— Bob Hamilton

#paradox #science #experience

In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism. ↗

— Elie Wiesel

#coffee #handle #instant #learned #lot