Unverified Personal Gnosis Is Personal
Jul. 17th, 2008 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brightrosefoxIn a very insightful and fascinating post on how to talk about spiritual experiences without sounding fluffy, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morgan303 says something really awesome:
"I think that there's always a risk of seeming 'fluffy' when talking about intensely personal spiritual experiences. I don't blog any of mine for that reason, but that's my failing (and also the fact that very few of my friends on LJ are in the least interested in anything like that and wouldn't 'get' it at all), rather than a personal belief that we should shut up about such things.
On the other hand there's a very long and beautiful tradition of poetical writings about gnosis or encounters with the divine. All of the Sufi authors that we know and love - Rumi, Hafiz, Rabia, Ibn Arabi, Attar, etc. were writing about their experiences with the Divine in poetical or 'teaching fable' terms. Christian gnostics such as St John, or Hildegaard of Bingen also wrote about their experiences, as did the authors of alchemical texts.
In more modern terms we can look to writers such as Borges, Yeats, William Blake, etc.
Amongst the more modern writers who write from a 'teaching' rather than a literary perspective, the most effective I can think of are the psychedelic writers; McKenna, Castaneda, etc.
There are many avenues open to us as writers; I think the first step we can take is to shed our self-consciousness and accept our place in a valid and millennia-long tradition of spiritual experience, and also accept the near-impossibility of capturing the awe, wonder, and majesty of our personal revelations, whilst still striving to communicate as much of it as possible.
It being The Internet, we will also have to have thick skins because there will always be people who feel the need to 'correct' our experiences, pointing out historical or mythological inaccuracies, or questioning our right to have even had them in the first place if we're not part of a specific tradition, etc. In my experience, genuine seekers are more interested in progressing along their own path and learning as much as possible, than hindering other people in their journey or trying to make themselves seem more impressive by belittling others. However, these people will always crop up and are often the most vocal. Ignoring them is a good step.:)
At the end of the day, an experience with the Divine is something deeply personal, going beyond human denominational boundaries, and is also nigh-impossible to express in 'impersonal', academic, authoritative terms, which is why most authors writing about their own experiences with gnosis, tend to write poetry.
We live in a culture today in which 'poetry' (by which I also mean poetic prose) is regarded for the most part as fluffy, a hobby, "mere" art (note inverted commas - I'm an artist by profession, so of course I don't agree with the classification of any sort of art as 'mere'!), rather than the shorthand of the soul or the expression of Truth, or one of the ways in which we can try to paint portraits of God (and just for the record I'm not a Christian, but I do like the term 'God' as a general descriptor). Today's post-Enlightenment culture is a deeply scientific one, and demands that for the most part validity be achieved by objectivity, impersonality and empirical evidence. These are not bad things in and of themselves, but a culture which is so overwhelmingly overbalanced in favour of this sort of thing is not one in which personal spiritual experience is regarded with much respect. Being aware that this is the case I think is an important step towards understanding why we often feel so uncomfortable about writing down our spiritual experiences, and why we fear being regarded as 'fluffy'. There is obviously a line between insisting that the Ancient Celts were peaceful, butterfly-loving Rainbow People, and insisting that your moment of enlightenment or glimpse of the divine is valid whatever your tradition, but we, as seekers, need to understand the prevailing culture and find a comfortable position for ourselves within (or without) it.
Ask William Blake, Rumi, Dante, Most of the contributors to The Bible, the great gnostics, alchemists and spiritual teachers of history, Gautama Buddha...so many incredible minds who have created what amounts to the very pinnacles of human artistic achievement in striving to communicate the moments when they saw God. We owe them all a great debt of gratitude.
You might as well ask, why write love poetry, or why paint sunsets.
Communicating with other people about the moments we caught a glimpse of something infinitely larger than ourselves is natural. Not only that it is, I feel, essential for our progression as a species. It's what we're made for. It's the deep yearning that you'll find in common in many of our greatest minds; it can serve as a gateway to the Divine for others, and the beauty of it binds us all together. We can all learn from these experiences of others. The greatest of them can give us a key to a very imposing door."
morgan303 says something really awesome: "I think that there's always a risk of seeming 'fluffy' when talking about intensely personal spiritual experiences. I don't blog any of mine for that reason, but that's my failing (and also the fact that very few of my friends on LJ are in the least interested in anything like that and wouldn't 'get' it at all), rather than a personal belief that we should shut up about such things.
On the other hand there's a very long and beautiful tradition of poetical writings about gnosis or encounters with the divine. All of the Sufi authors that we know and love - Rumi, Hafiz, Rabia, Ibn Arabi, Attar, etc. were writing about their experiences with the Divine in poetical or 'teaching fable' terms. Christian gnostics such as St John, or Hildegaard of Bingen also wrote about their experiences, as did the authors of alchemical texts.
In more modern terms we can look to writers such as Borges, Yeats, William Blake, etc.
Amongst the more modern writers who write from a 'teaching' rather than a literary perspective, the most effective I can think of are the psychedelic writers; McKenna, Castaneda, etc.
There are many avenues open to us as writers; I think the first step we can take is to shed our self-consciousness and accept our place in a valid and millennia-long tradition of spiritual experience, and also accept the near-impossibility of capturing the awe, wonder, and majesty of our personal revelations, whilst still striving to communicate as much of it as possible.
It being The Internet, we will also have to have thick skins because there will always be people who feel the need to 'correct' our experiences, pointing out historical or mythological inaccuracies, or questioning our right to have even had them in the first place if we're not part of a specific tradition, etc. In my experience, genuine seekers are more interested in progressing along their own path and learning as much as possible, than hindering other people in their journey or trying to make themselves seem more impressive by belittling others. However, these people will always crop up and are often the most vocal. Ignoring them is a good step.:)
At the end of the day, an experience with the Divine is something deeply personal, going beyond human denominational boundaries, and is also nigh-impossible to express in 'impersonal', academic, authoritative terms, which is why most authors writing about their own experiences with gnosis, tend to write poetry.
We live in a culture today in which 'poetry' (by which I also mean poetic prose) is regarded for the most part as fluffy, a hobby, "mere" art (note inverted commas - I'm an artist by profession, so of course I don't agree with the classification of any sort of art as 'mere'!), rather than the shorthand of the soul or the expression of Truth, or one of the ways in which we can try to paint portraits of God (and just for the record I'm not a Christian, but I do like the term 'God' as a general descriptor). Today's post-Enlightenment culture is a deeply scientific one, and demands that for the most part validity be achieved by objectivity, impersonality and empirical evidence. These are not bad things in and of themselves, but a culture which is so overwhelmingly overbalanced in favour of this sort of thing is not one in which personal spiritual experience is regarded with much respect. Being aware that this is the case I think is an important step towards understanding why we often feel so uncomfortable about writing down our spiritual experiences, and why we fear being regarded as 'fluffy'. There is obviously a line between insisting that the Ancient Celts were peaceful, butterfly-loving Rainbow People, and insisting that your moment of enlightenment or glimpse of the divine is valid whatever your tradition, but we, as seekers, need to understand the prevailing culture and find a comfortable position for ourselves within (or without) it.
Ask William Blake, Rumi, Dante, Most of the contributors to The Bible, the great gnostics, alchemists and spiritual teachers of history, Gautama Buddha...so many incredible minds who have created what amounts to the very pinnacles of human artistic achievement in striving to communicate the moments when they saw God. We owe them all a great debt of gratitude.
You might as well ask, why write love poetry, or why paint sunsets.
Communicating with other people about the moments we caught a glimpse of something infinitely larger than ourselves is natural. Not only that it is, I feel, essential for our progression as a species. It's what we're made for. It's the deep yearning that you'll find in common in many of our greatest minds; it can serve as a gateway to the Divine for others, and the beauty of it binds us all together. We can all learn from these experiences of others. The greatest of them can give us a key to a very imposing door."
