Chapter 7. Clarification of key religious concepts:

Toward the Meaning of the Experience of Purgation and Mystical Union: My mind has been directed toward gaining these insights ever since I began this study in 1984, indeed, ever since I began the religious journey in December 1957.

1. The essence of faith.

Sometimes, desperate people - when their backs are to the wall facing defeat, death, and/or disintegration - make a miraculous recovery. Examples are found among warriors, businessmen, athletes, people on their death bed, prisoners, former addicts of one kind or another, etc. Do you remember the people of London during the Battle of Britain? Do you remember the people of Grand Forks, North Dakota during the Red River flood of 1997? Do you remember the night Archie Moore came back from a terrific beating in the first round to defeat a powerful Canadian boxer? An Engineer's Story is a narrative that details one person's experience of this mode or capability, including the desperate circumstances that brought it about.

All such people are knowers of a greatness within that has enabled them to function in these situations in a mode far more profound, powerful, and skilled than their ordinary abilities. This human capability probably evolved during the desperate battle conditions of our earliest hominid ancestors. This capability is always available to human beings. To know this is the essence of faith.

2. The meaning of life: Cracking the Code!

There is something driving us to our full potential: to our ultimate end or object; to our telos. This telos is ultimate trueness, freedom, integrity, grounding, and love, but we never seem to attain it. Whatever trueness, freedom, integrity, grounding, or love we attain, we sense it is not enough. We need more.

In my case my full potential, my telos, was only satisfied when I had experienced mystical union. It was in mystical union that I experienced ultimate trueness, freedom, integrity, grounding, and love. When that occurred I felt my search was over. I was finally satisfied. Therefore, it was this that I had been driven to, unconsciously. The drive toward this goal is mostly hidden from us; it is unconscious: An unconscious life force or entelechy is silently and wordlessly informing us: 'Come to the state of ultimate freedom, trueness, integrity, grounding, and love.

From the point of view of intentionality our lives are about reaching this goal, the state of ultimate freedom, trueness, integrity, grounding, and love. That is, in our daily lives this is the unconscious intentionality of our conscious lives. This unconscious intentionality is driven, in turn, by some sort of unconscious life force.

With these insights the mystic had cracked the code: He had found the structure underlying the dance or game of life and he had a conjecture on what drives the dance.

3. The nature of God: The essence of religion

Focusing on the transition from purgation to mystical union gives powerful insights: During purgation my imagination produced mental imagery and the emergence of an archetype when I really needed it. These products of my imagination played a central role in stabilizing my mind during the experience of purgation. However, they suddenly ceased functioning at the moment of cessation in mystical union. The fact that God was experienced then, after those two aspects of the imagination had shut down, conflicts with the present position of both the scientific community and the Western psychological community. The Western psychological community's extensive study of the mind has convinced them that God is a product of the imagination. My position is that we must go deeper: The experience of God originates at a much deeper level:

During mystical union inner sense ceases; including the inner sense of time, the ability to think, to imagine, to will, and to make immediate recall. Simultaneously, one has an ecstatic experience of merger with the essence of one's inner self or inner Being. This timeless essence or Immensity or Ground cannot be conditioned, either by society or authorities or by anything else. The ecstatic experience of this Ground, occurring after purgation when my heart had been purified and fully opened, is an experience of an unsurpassable Greatness that fully satisfied my desperate search for groundedness.

Immediately after, when I came down from mystical union and ordinary consciousness partially returned, I was in a heavenly state. This state is called bhava by the Hindus and 'the Peace that passeth all understanding' or 'Beulah land' or heaven by Protestant mystics. It is a state of supreme bliss.

A few months later, I gradually returned to ordinary consciousness. Then, in 1985 or thereabouts, I began to search my language for a name for the formless and unsurpassable Greatness experienced in mystical union, because I needed to communicate the insights emerging from this work. Because I was born and raised in the United States and English is my native language, the only name I could find that satisfied my heart and mind was the word, God, the name my precious mother spoke to me about when I was a boy.

If I had been born and raised in a Hindu culture, the name I would have chosen would have been Brahman; If I had been born and raised in a Muslim culture, the name would have been Allah; If I had been born and raised in a Japanese Buddhist culture, the name would have been No Thing or Emptiness; etc.

Arlen Wolpert
April 22,2008
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
http://world.std.com/~awolpert/gtr308.html

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