@jonmsweeney As a teen, my 14th floor room of student housing overlooked Blake's grave. Later, I would pilgrimage to it. If pilgrimage is to extroverted mysticism what mysticism is to introverted pilgrimage, what of absolute and concreteness as simultaneity? What of messianic love incarnate?
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Final paragraph of Frye's 'Fearful Symmetry': If mysticism means primarily a contemplative quietism, mysticism is something abhorrent to Blake, a Selfhood-communing in Ulro; if it means primarily a spiritual illumination expressing itself in a practical and (in spite of its psychological subtlety) unspeculative piety, such as we find in the militant monasticism of the Counter-Reformation, the word still does not fit him. But if mysticism means primarily the vision of the prodigious and unthinkable metamorphosis of the human mind just described, then Blake is one of the mystics. | #
@TaraAnnThieke The heart of Christ. Kabir: "Experience, O Seeker, is the essence of all things." Then again, Johnson: "If one works faithfully and patiently at this task of balancing heaven and earth, eventually one may realize something more remarkable: that the two worlds are in fact one."
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That’s still a fundamental prejudice, this time making a victim of ‘outer’ reality. We can have One without denying the Other, in the unifying locus of experience itself: “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and…” In messianism, the outward drive is considered equal to the inward. The re-establishment of all things in their proper place, constituting redemption, dissolves division between inwardness and outwardness, producing a totality in which one does not fall victim to the other. The Great Secret, the Great Mystery, is this: there is a heart of the world and, in our depths, it is yours. Depth doesn’t mean ‘far-inside’, but our life ever-opening to ourselves and the world. The heart is our capacity to open to all that we experience, inside and out. In gradually opening our heart, in loving kindness for ourselves and others, no matter the assaults or dangers, we step toward our shared, essential destiny, the evolution of the world in love.
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‘Celebrity worship’ tweet and quote tweet here: ‘Then again’ tweet, image and quote tweet here: This dynamic homeostasis in which inner-and-outer narratives effectively mix and match? The single co-evolutionary realm in which Reality comes to fullness in us, individually and together. The concrete reality of worldly and spiritual salvation, reconciliation and redemption. In the dialectics of Jewish mysticism, the drive outward is essentially considered equal to the inward drive. The re-establishment of all things in their proper place, which constitutes redemption, produces a totality knowing nothing of a division between inwardness and ‘outwardness, ensuring that one does ot fall victim to the other. This, the Messianic Moment, is therefore defined by a new ‘architecture of holiness' (Heschel). Personal redemption, a make-believe project. We are whole, finally...