The Mystical Journey

 

Provocative readings recently have featured a half dozen or so works that circle about “visionary recitals,” hoping for exposure to the numinous, moving like Rilke’s orbits around the ancient tower, perhaps to gain personal guidance on this journey, probing the beyond. Rilke’s imagery suggests the way:

“I live my life in growing orbits

which move out over the things of the world.

Perhaps I can never achieve the last,

but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,

and I have been circling for a thousand years,

and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,

or a great song.”

   Translation by Robert Bly, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, pp. 12-13. 

     [see also, Going in Circles]

     The “tower” centers a life by providing the gravity that holds against the centrifugal force. The orbits drawn by guidance are building the character needed to prevent the accumulated life experience from dissipating into nothingness. This guidance protects from being drawn into false idols of power-mad cults as well as from the seductions of narcissism. Finding and refining the “tower” directs the journey to heaven. The theme of “visionary recitals” offers such a tower. 

     A visionary recital that carries particular magnetism for me comes in Attar’s [d. 1229] Conference of the Birds. Yearning for the Divine, as Rilke tells, distinguishes this tower with its orbital power, and my connection with Attar’s masterpiece has been engaged for at least a decade or so … “if one sigh rises from the inmost soul…” 

Eleven minutes after the previous photo

     This magnetism of Attar’s work prompted an orbit into Avicenna [d. 1037] to explore source material drawn upon by Attar. The significance of this exploration receives fascinating elaboration by Henry Corbin who summarizes the importance: “With Attar’s poem, the end of the celestial ascent finally marks full mystical consciousness of encountering, attaining to, the Self to which one says ‘Thou’” (p. 169, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital). Corbin’s study led to consideration of Salaman and Absal as well as Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (translation and commentary by Lenn Evan Goodman). The trace soon focused on Ian Richard Netton’s Islam, Christianity and the Mystic Journey which includes particular reference to Qushayriya’s Sufi Book of Spiritual Ascent. The spin also led into Austin O’Malley’s The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction: Farid al-Din ʿAttar and Persian Sufi Didacticism.

Netton synthesizes the central theme on page one: 

“like the great Persian mystical poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi (AD 1207-73), before her, [Professor Annemarie] Schimmel expresses the essence of Sufism best in her poetry [referencing p. 42 from Nightingales Under the Snow “… I wait for the silent night/ when the archangel’s purple wing/ will cover the eyes of my heart/ and there will be nothing but You.”]. The verse captures one of the most commonplace, and yet deepest, of all sufi themes, the yearning of the terrestrial-bound soul for communion, intimacy and ultimate union (whatever that might mean!) with the Divine ‘Object’ and focus of sufi love, God Himself.”

     Manna for going along life’s way comes in the imagery of orbiting around the tower and/or of traveling with a guide (as Attar’s sojourners or Dante’s descent or so many stories tell). Corbin suggests:

The idea of the journey into the Orient—that is, of the soul’s return to its “home” under the conduct of its Guide, its celestial Self—implies an “angelic pedagogy” that makes the being of the particular soul and the notion of soul in general concurrent with an angelology. This concurrence is particularly clear in the Recital of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, in which the Avicennan angelology propounds its triple hierarchy: there are the Archangels or pure Intelligences, the Kerubim (Cherubs). There are the Angels who emanate from them and who are the moving Souls of the celestial spheres. There are the human souls, or ‘terrestrial angels,’ who move and govern earthly human bodies (p. 46) …

This recital is an initiation into the Orient: the meaning of the Orient is announced to the adept by a messenger from that Orient itself, who shows him its direction, describes the difficult stages of the journey thither, sets forth the conditions for undertaking it, and finally concludes with the invitation: “If thou wilt, follow me.” (p. 123, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital)

Sunset, August 27, 2026

Of Love, Beauty, and Sadness

      And, of Love, what can we say or know or live? Moving daily further along, does it only swirl more mysterious, inner and outer? 

Reading from Henry Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital:

“But what the Soul tenderly desires is precisely to assimilate itself with the Intelligence by becoming like it, as the disciple makes himself like his master, or the lover like the beloved. To do this, the Soul must ‘grasp the beauty of the object that it loves; the image of that beauty increases the ardor of its love, this ardor makes the soul look upward, and thence arises a motion by which it can apply itself to the object with which it desires to assimilate itself. Thus imagination of beauty causes ardor of love, love causes desire (inquisitio), and desire causes motion.’”

 

    Corbin continues into the next page commenting on Suhrawardi’s The Familiar of the Mystical Lovers with a discussion of “three beings who proceed from the threefold self-intellection of the Intelligence [who] bear three names that, despite appearances, are less abstractions than typifications, since they have correspondences in three names from Biblico-Koranic hagiography (Joseph, Zulaykha, Jacob). The three figures that proceed from the meditation of the First Archangel reflecting upon his being are named Beauty, Love, Sadness. Of these three dramatis personae, Sadness corresponds to the heaven whose subtle matter ‘materializes’ the thought of a nonbeing; it measures the zone of shadow, the distance that always intrudes between Love and the Beauty to which it aspires—that is, between the celestial Angel and the Angel-Cherub. But at the same time this heaven, this Sadness, is the instrument that allows the Soul, by the roundabout way of a long pilgrimage, to approach that Beauty, to attain the goal of its desire, just as, by moving its heaven, the Soul tends toward the Angel from which it emanates. Thus the same nostalgia that is close to the secret of the mystic’s heart is likewise the secret of celestial physics.” pp. 74-75

 

    So good to have guidance on the way that gives place and relationship among Sadness, Beauty, and Love; and all this encouragement for finding oneself on the pilgrimage of life with such fine companions.

Capacity

Rain is falling outside the window, softening the hard soil, as needed, for example, by the newly planted seedlings in our “colossal pollinator garden,” a vital niche in life on earth. This rainfall is also required for raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries to fill and sweeten, and it’s wanted further on throughout all the burgeoning summer growth for continued nourishment. 

     Thunder now rumbles overhead with a reminder of the potential power of water, referenced in the Tao cited below as the weakest or softest, yet capable of galloping through the strongest.

The weakest in all beneath heaven gallops through the strongest, 

and vacant absence slips inside solid presence. 

I know by this the value of nothing’s own doing. 

The teaching without words, 

the value of nothing’s own doing: 

few indeed master such things.

[from p. 83, David Hinton. The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius. Kindle Edition] 

     James Legge translates line 2: “that which has no (substantial) existence enters where there is no crevice” and comments “Ho-shang Kung says that ‘what has no existence’ is the Tao; it is better to understand by the insubstantial air which penetrates everywhere, we cannot see how” (p. 87, The Texts of Taoism). The passages on Tao extend understanding of emptiness attended in previous blog entries. 

     The closing line notes that “few indeed master such things.” Being able to live like this, in harmony with the Way, which might also be understood as living by the Spirit, is perhaps the ultimate goal of a life well lived, mastered by “few in the world,” certainly worthy of dedicated focus. And very interestingly, the way is made not by brute force but marked by the “weakest” (Hinton’s translation in line 1), by the “softest” (as Legge and Nasr translate the opening line).

     Nasr also comments on the last line: 

“Only the sages and a selected few comprehend teaching without words and the possibility of acting without acting [wu wei ] and put them into practice. Understanding this truth is not possible for everyone” (p. 123, S.H. Nasr, A Sufi Commentary on the Tao Te Ching: The Way and Its Virtue).

     While the understanding referenced in this text may be quite demanding, current conditions indicate that such work is crucially needed.  Jim Palmer has been writing eloquently about the urgency of developing such capacity.  

"A person’s ability to tolerate uncertainty, remain present during grief, sustain belonging, exercise restraint, or stay grounded when familiar structures collapse … Capacity often becomes visible only when circumstances become difficult. It reveals itself not through performance but through what a person can carry without avoidance, fragmentation, or retreat into illusion." 

Palmer explains how the collapse of structures (especially including organized religion) calls for significant investment in nurturing existential health, like the soft strength of rain, because the well-being of individuals today is confronted by a flood of troubles.

"Questions once answered collectively become questions individuals must answer for themselves. What gives life meaning? Who am I? How should I live? What should I believe? What matters? How do I face suffering? What makes life worth continuing when certainty disappears?

Modernity did not solve these questions.

It privatized them.

The result is a profound transfer of responsibility from external structures to the individual. Increasing numbers of people are being asked to carry psychological and existential responsibilities that previous generations often shared with religion, culture, family, community, and tradition. Yet society rarely pauses to ask whether people possess the capacities necessary to meet these demands.

This may be one of the defining developmental challenges of our age."

Infinite Mystery

Several threads seem weaving into some indefinable mesh that yet might collectively be contemplated within the theme of “infinite mystery.” Almost any deep reflection in the overlapping worlds of social history, personal experience, religion/theology/spirituality, and contemporary political activity butts into the inescapable quagmire of theodicy: How can suffering fit in a design made by an all-powerful and all-loving God?  Perhaps, among other possibilities, this problematic condition paradoxically pushes a kind of vitality, a relentless impulse toward further development, toward trying to know more even when admitting the hard awareness that the ultimate foundation must be the Unknowable. Just perhaps it’s this complex that generates the energy needed for living in perplexity which includes an essential grace of protection, a slight safety from presumption, a safety that draws from continuous confession of surrender and into forgiveness. 

     This perspective on the mesh, possibly on a tapestry not primarily made by human hands, seems more viewable in the field of emptiness (discussed in the preceding post).  Reading on from Waddell’s Zen Words, (quoted in that post), let's consider D.T. Suzuki’s Manual of Zen Buddhism as it further elaborates on One Mind:

“It has been in existence since the beginningless past; it knows neither birth nor death; it is neither blue nor yellow; it has neither shape nor form; it is beyond the category of being and non-being; it is not to be measured by age, old or new; it is neither long nor short; it is neither large nor small’ for it transcends all limits, words, traces, and opposites. It must be taken just as it is in itself; when an attempt is made on our part to grasp it in our thoughts, it eludes. It is like space whose boundaries are altogether beyond measurement no concepts are applicable here.” (p. 112)

     Additional threads coming in today include items shared by Jim Palmer’s Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality and from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation.  From the Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality:

"The great spiritual discovery is not merely that you are loved. It is that love is more original than the self you spend so much energy defending. It precedes your achievements, your failures, your beliefs, and your fears. The journey is not toward earning love, finding love, or securing love. It is toward recognizing what has been true from the beginning.

The journey is not toward earning love, finding love, or securing love. It is toward recognizing what has been true from the beginning: that you have always existed within it. The ground you have been searching for is the ground on which you already stand. And at your deepest level, beneath every identity, every wound, every role, and every belief, love is not only what holds you. It is what you are." [citing Jim Palmer, Notes from (Over) the Edge]

     Also in today’s meditation from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation: 

“a radically different understanding of spirituality. The central question is no longer whether we can convince God to love us. It becomes whether we can awaken to the love that is already present before belief, before doctrine, before identity, before any attempt to prove our worthiness. Love is not something added to existence. We emerge from it, live within it, and participate in it whether we recognize it or not."

     These meditations reinforce a convergence that continues to build in my post-midnight wonderments that strangely reassuringly probe and assert that the bounds and textures of Love permeate with the Infinite Mystery. Surely, the final answer (as one is allowed to approach it) is Love; of course, the “love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:19). And, again, while the overthrowing of the rational mind feels disconcerting, some comfort also comes from the resonance of having survived this apparent calamity before. For example, in the puzzling combo of know/not-know. 

So the big realities recur in such a unity: God, Self, Mind… The midnight whisper says “Walk on. Go slowly…or not…" 

For as The Center for Action and Contemplation notes:

"I’m not in control or in charge of this Holy Mystery. I don’t presume to understand it; all I know is that I’m forever being drawn through everything. Each manifestation or epiphany of God calls for surrender, communion, and intimacy.”

Force of Emptiness

May 31, 2026 brings forward a spectrum of features: 

* Heather Cox Richardson recounts a tragic event from this date in 1889 when over 2,200 lives were swept away in the Johnstown flood caused through the greed of materialism. 

* Richard Rohr’s meditation for today:
“The dualistic mind cannot deal with the biggies: love, death, suffering, God, infinity, and the very notion of grace.”  

* From Jim Palmer’s Week in Review

“The weakening of religion did not eliminate humanity’s need for meaning, belonging, or transcendence. Technological progress did not solve loneliness, mortality, grief, or purpose. Information abundance did not produce wisdom. Instead, many people now find themselves carrying enormous responsibility for constructing identity, meaning, and coherence under increasingly destabilizing conditions.”

* Reading in the wee hours:

Beneath an empty autumn sky stretch stretch endless wastes where no one goes. Who is that horseman riding from the west? These lines are by Wang Ch’angling, a Chinese poet of the eighth century. Using them to depict the realm of total emptiness and the marvelous activity of enlightenment that emerges from within it, Hakuin calls on students to affirm the sutra’s negations for themselves. (p. 43, Zen Words for the Heart: Hakuin’s Commentary on the Heart Sutra, Translated by Norman Waddell)

     Going yet further back, we note that these all are echos from the opening of Wisdom “all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

And yet, still, the day begins with glory of a setting full moon and rosy hues from a rising sun. 

The Ecstatic Blur

 

Sunset yesterday

     Sometimes a partial is all that’s given. Whisp of a dream… the unavailable you and the might-be beloved speak “You…” The words in the dream have slipped back across the veil. Right enough. Dreams and other ecstatic whiffs are just enough to draw the next step, into the blur…A-slant. 
Ex-stasis. Outside self. Not literal. 

Literal. Letter?  Word. Representation. Re-Present is not same as present (in its multiple meanings slip-sliding to push the edge of sense). This chain of associations brings to mind Epaminondas: the tragedy of literalism and fundamentalism; the risks yet critical necessity of imagery running into troubles of idolatry and idealism…
     All this points toward realization of “other.” The standing outside of one’s self. The Ecstatic. The Not. Nothingness. Not knowing as beginning of wisdom. Nishitani on going beyond emptiness. 

“It is only in breaking through to the field of ecstatic transcendence (or trans-descendence), then, that the awareness of birth-and-death as ’transmigration’ comes about. This ecstatic trans-descendence appears in the endlessness of finite life and in the totality of the horizon that embraces the mode of being of man along with that of the other species. Nihility opens up only in this transcendence.” (Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp. 174-5). 

Transcendence?  At least going outside. Ecstatic. “Non-knowledge communicates ecstasy,”  Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience.
     Rosemarie Waldrop opens Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes:

“Faced with an undecipherable world we set out to create language, a place where human discourse can arises, and we come to exist as human beings; where, at the same time, we can maintain a relation to what transcends us, the undecipherable, the ultimate otherness, and speak to it under the name of God.” (p. 1)

Nothingness for Love

 

May 6

“As you proceed along the Way, you will attain a state of everydayness…
Why leave behind your proper place, which exists right in your own home, and wander aimlessly off to the dusty realms of other lands? If you make even a single misstep, you stray from the Great Way lying directly before you. . .
Form and substance are like dewdrops on the grass, destiny like the dart of lightning—vanishing in an instant, disappearing in a flash.” (p. 5, The Heart of Dogen’s Shobogenzo, trans. Norman Waddell and Masao Abe.)

The next section in The Heart of Dogen’s Shobogenzo tells of Dogen’s “pilgrimage in search of the Dharma in Japan and China” (p. 7). 

     This text and other recent readings open wandering amid the paradox:  A) the lifelong search for the Way, and Z) right alongside is realizing “the Great Way lying directly before.”  Of course, the answer is Love, God is Love. Here, there, everywhere, there’s only the One Love. But what a great mystery this makes in living it out!

     From life’s journey supported by fabulous readings, perhaps there’s come an absorbing of  “nothingness.” Accepting the mystery of love conjoins with my inability to say “I love” because love transcends my naming-containing it as if I could give love. And yet by getting lost/found in submission to the I/not-I, a possibility seems given for love-coming-through. God loves. With this realization, the not-I opens for a flow, like a space through which the wind is moving. 

     Also around 3:32AM, I note the movement through life’s journey by “not” (again, the theme of recent recent readings and posts).  Early on, a detour (an about-face?) happened in this life journey when forced to admit I’m not a preacher (despite Mother’s wish) yet I’m given (a thanks-for-trying prize) a devotion to rhetoric and a (different?) career path. Then drawn by love’s hand into the mytho-poetic but soon enough comes hard knock of not : Not belonging there and not a poet. Yet provided a surprise-gift of a dedication to teaching-story.  In addition, Fate decrees: Not a city dweller nor university professor but this propels to woodland stewardship in our cosmic ecosystem. 

May 6

Another no/not was to a dream design combining quantum storytelling with natural horsemanship. Instead a blog writer reading theology and musing in the middle of the night.

Way. No way. Dewdrop journey from
Fundamentalism but
Disillusion with hellfire conversions into
Relativity. Multiplicity. Philosophy &
Analytical psychology to
“Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell; 
Mythopoetics with Robert Bly & Gioia to
Teaching Story— 
Poetry, especially Rumi—but not a poet so
Sweat lodge & “Day for Men” for twenty years…
Then to Sufi healing but not a healer. And
Confronted by the “Death of God”— 
Return to Jesus, theology of the cross.
From Existentialism to Oneness to
Emptiness & Nothingness. Thus
The Way. Is. no-way

May 7 dawning