Seeing through exterior things, and seeing God in them
Thomas Merton
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A blind feeling of one’s own being, stretching unto God
The Cloud of Unknowing
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The pure, loving gaze that finds God everywhere
Brother Lawrence
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The mind’s loving, unmixed, permanent attention to the things of God
Francis de Sales
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Finding God in all things
Ignatius of Loyola
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The window of the soul cleansed perfectly
and made completely transparent by the divine light
John of the Cross
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A continual condition of prayerful sensitivity to what is really going on
Douglas Steere
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Seeing God in everything and everything in God
with completely extraordinary clearness and delicacy
Marie of the Incarnation
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The enlightening of the understanding, joined to the joys of God’s love
Walter Hilton
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Continual communion through all things
by quite simply doing everything in the presence of the Holy Trinity
Elizabeth of the Trinity
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Awareness, absorbed and amazed
Teresa of Avila
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The mind, gazing upon the universe of God’s handiwork, rapt by the divine and infinite light
Maximus the Confessor
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The mind stolen from itself by the ineffable sweetness of the Word
Bernard of Clairvaux
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Divine wakefulness with pure and naked intuition
Gregory of Nyssa
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With the flash of one trembling glance, my mind arrived at THAT WHICH IS, but I could not fix my gaze thereon.
Augustine
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The alertness which finds everything plain and grasps it clearly with entire comprehension
Hugh of St.Victor
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Receiving the clarity of God without any means; a single nakedness that embraces all things
Jan Van Ruysbroek
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Right understanding, with true longing, absolute trust, and sweet grace-giving mindfulness
Julian of Norwich
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Awakening to the presence of God in the human heart and in the universe which is around us… knowledge by love
Dom Bede Griffiths
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The world becoming luminous from within
as one plunges breathlessly into human activity
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), Danish philosopher. Either/Or, vol. 2, “Balance between Esthetic and Ethical” (1843; tr. 1987).
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Mysticism has been in the past & probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world & it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.
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W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. Letter, 10 Oct. 1893, to author Laurence Housman (published in Collected Letters, vol. 1, ed. by John Kelly, 1986). In an earlier letter (23 July 1892), Yeats had written: “The mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write. . . . I have always considered myself a voice of what I
believe to be a greater renaissance- the revolt of the soul against the intellect.”
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Hanging by God’s thread of pure Love
~Catherine of Genoa
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Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Grey Eminence, ch. 9 (1941).
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The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born U.S. theoretical physicist. Quoted in: Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, ch. 12, sct. 5 (1947).
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