More on visions: the power of nothing

One of my favorite blogs out there is The Desert Retreat House by Paul Kowalewski.  He lives in and writes from the Coachella Valley, the desert valley that is "one up" from my own beloved Borrego Valley.

Along the theme of my post of a couple of weeks ago, on mystical experiences and visions of God,  he tells us today about "believing in nothing". Speaking of St John of the Cross, and the "Dark night of the Soul", he writes

In his dark night of "nada," John came to experience the Holy Presence as he had never before been able. He entered into a love affair with "God." -a passionate encounter with a mystical unnamable Abiding Presence that could never be explained by theologies. In fact, he referred to all his past beliefs as, "substitutes for God"- feeble attempts of the intellect to capture and control an elusive mystery that can never be contained or explained.

and goes on to explain his own journey: 

 I've lost the kind of faith I once possessed and gained a new kind of faith. 

I now have faith in "nothing"- belief in "nada" It's not so much that I doubt all the things I had previously believed - it goes beyond doubt. I have been set free from all my answers- such a "great relief."

All I can now do is be present to the wondrous mystery - new every morning.

You should bookmark his blog.  I find much there to savor.

On visions and mystical experience

Barbara Ehrenreich, atheist and scientist writes of a striking vision she experienced at 17, when the world seemed suddenly ablaze.

There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of. It seemed to me that whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze. I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered.

And naturally, her most likely explanation was a breakdown of some sort.  Hypoglycemic.  Hallucinating. 

An alternative to the insanity explanation would be that such experiences do represent some sort of encounter. It was my scientific training, oddly enough, that eventually nudged me to consider this possibility. Sometime in middle age, when I had become a writer and amateur historian, I decided that the insanity explanation may have been a cop-out, that I could have seen something that morning in Lone Pine. 

If mystical experiences represent some sort of an encounter, as they have commonly been described, is it possible to find out what they are encounters with? Science could continue to dismiss mystical experiences as mental phenomena, internal to ourselves, but the merest chance that they may represent some sort of contact or encounter justifies investigation. We need more data and more subjective accounts. But we also need a neuroscience bold enough to go beyond the observation that we are “wired” for transcendent experience; the real challenge is to figure out what happens when those wires connect. Is science ready to take on the search for the source of our most uncanny experiences? 

Fortunately, science itself has been changing. It was simply overwhelmed by the empirical evidence, starting with quantum mechanics and the realization that even the most austere vacuum is a happening place, bursting with possibility and giving birth to bits of something, even if they’re only fleeting particles of matter and antimatter. Without invoking anything supernatural, we may be ready to acknowledge that we are not, after all, alone in the universe. There is no evidence for a God or gods, least of all caring ones, but our mystical experiences give us tantalizing glimpses of other forms of consciousness, which may be beings of some kind, ordinarily invisible to us and our instruments. Or it could be that the universe is itself pulsing with a kind of life, and capable of bursting into something that looks to us momentarily like the flame.