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Most Succinct Summary of the Mystical Path

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Staff member
Premium Member
Give me the most succinct but accurate description you've read concerning the stages of the mystical life and/or the transformation in consciousness brought about by mystical experience (s).

I leave it to you to make the judgement call regarding what qualifies as "succinct" for the purposes of the thread (i.e. a single word, a sentence, a short paragraph etc.)

There's an intetesting agraphon (extra-canonical saying) attributed to Jesus by the early church father St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215) in his Stromata, which also crops up in the lost Gospel of the Hebrews and in the extant Gospel of Thomas (logion 2).

Given its fairly wide attestation in ancient orthodox and gnostic sources, the saying may actually go back to Jesus himself in some form (well, if you are the kind of person comfortable with the idea that not everything Jesus said necessarily made it into the canonical gospels).


As also it stands written in the Gospel of the Hebrews: "He that marvels shall reign, and he that has reigned shall rest." (Clem. Alex. Strom. II 9.45)

GHeb 4b

To those words this is equivalent: "He that seeks will not rest until he finds. Upon finding, he will be disturbed; and when he has been disturbed he will be astonished and shall reign; and he that has reigned shall rest." (Clem Alex. Strom. V 14.96)


To my mind, the literary simplicity of this teaching betrays it's rather profound meaning.

When we have an experience that challenges the familiar assumptions of our conventional worldview and sense of self, that revelation can be troubling at first to process.

But once the phase of being disturbed and disoriented has passed, we come upon a sense of awe and wonderment that opens the way for us to feel like we are "on top of the world" and this finally brings peace, as we rest in the humbling knowledge that we understand so little and that (in the words of Blessed John of Ruysbroeck"):

"All we taste in comparison with that which remains out of our reach, is no more than a single drop of water compared with the whole sea" and from this knowledge we "taste infinite happiness, impossible to comprehend, in which the whole being dissolves".
 
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