Mysticism - East versus West
Mystic
experiences in the East are always experiences are bliss. People who
witnessed mystics in India speak for this. Reported mystical
experiences in the West were dark and painful, often empty with no
divine experiences. Could it be a struggle between the Christian
scriptural conditioning that does not allow direct experiences of the
divine and unconditioned mystical experiences?
Toward the end of his life, Eckhart was charged (and found guilty after
his death in 1327), with heresy for his mystical assertions which the
Catholic Church determined had bled over into pantheism.
Eckhart
“believed that in every human soul there is something of the very nature
of God. Here it is that the human soul meets God…. [His] doctrine of
the human soul has lasted to the present, and is reaffirmed whenever one
speaks of a Divine Spark within each of us.”
Eckhart
made statements such as these: "Henceforth I shall not speak about
the soul, for she has lost her name yonder in the oneness of divine
essence. There she is no more called soul: she is called infinite
being. And, She plunges into the bottomless well of the divine
nature and becomes one with God that she herself would say that she is
God." Such statements not only bothered the Medieval Church but some
more modern researchers have found agreements in Eckhart's philosophy
with all the major points of Hindu mystics.
http://www.inplainsite.org/html/mysticism.html
Echhart's comments and mystical experiences align with the Eastern traditions. No doubt the Catholic church charged him with heresy. How do mystical experiences of Christian believers differ from the mystical experiences of Eastern traditions?
Dark Experiences in Western Mysticism vs. Blissful Experiences in Eastern Mysticism
In a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, mother Theresa wrote "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have free hand."
In the booktitled Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist".
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."
Mother Teresa had visions, including one of herself conversing with Christ on the Cross. Her confessor, Father Celeste Van Exem, was convinced that her mystical experiences were genuine.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00.html
Dominican Fr. Paul Murrary, meanwhile, argued that on the basis of Mother Teresa’s private writings, published only after her death, she now ranks not only as a friend of the poor, but as one of the great mystics of the Catholic tradition, with an interior life “comparable in depth and intensity to St. John of the Cross.”
Those private writings were collected as part of the beatification process, and had previously been known only to a handful of spiritual directors and church authorities. They spoke not only of mystical visions and revelations in the 1940s, but an inner darkness stretching over most of the rest of her life and which led her even to question the existence of God.
We now know that Mother Teresa’s spiritual journey, Murray said, “was not one long unbroken experience of bliss, with roses of consolation strewn along the way.” Instead, she lived with a sense of “bewildering rejection and even complete abandonment,” as “her prayers were not heard and God remained silent.”
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/mother-teresa-mystic-and-apostle-ordinary
John of the Cross
When the sixteenth-century mystic John of the Cross identified a
similar phenomenon—this spiritual desolation called the "dark night of
the soul"—he insisted that it is an important spiritual discipline. The
dark night, said John, is a tortuous but fruitful path to union with
God. For the great Carmelite, the dark night was just one part of an
elaborate theology that penetrated beyond the realm of our senses and
reason to come before God as The Awesome Unknown.
C.S. Lewis
In
his late 50s, C. S. Lewis finally found and married his true love:
American writer Joy Davidman Gresham. But four years later, after an
agonizing battle with cancer, Joy died. During the period of intense
grieving, Lewis filled four notebooks—first, with words of anguish and
rage, then with an introspective record of the changes that this loss
worked in his character. The notebooks were published one year after
Joy's death as A Grief Observed, at first under a pseudonym. Some
have guessed that Lewis resorted to an assumed name because his grief
took him to the precipice of doubt. He asked the same sorts of questions
that the grieving often ask: Was God, after all, a cosmic sadist? Did he even exist?