From a definition point of view, I think that everything we do counts as an experience, although the use of the word is usually to mean something that lasts longer and records itself in our memories more firmly.
But the question is about things that are done to us, when we are unconscious.
Not quite sure what you mean here, could you clarify, please?
Wen I am unconscious, and asleep, my brain will be busy re-sorting and filing all recent input and making mne wake at the same time every day. When I am unconscious because of being anaesthetised, I trust the medical staff to do their best
The environment and any sort of accident might happen, but that is not something being done to me personally or directly.
Good point. I might have had a near-death experience whilst I was unconscious (the surgery took about 5 hours), but I certainly don't remember anything!
I asked if something like that, by which I mean it happens when you are unconscious and you don't remember it, counts as an experience. Because you haven't experienced it by any usual meaning of the word. To relate it to what you said, @SusanDoris, it does not record itself in Bishop Finger's memory at all. As he said, he doesn't remember it.
Thank you. I wonder, if there was indeed an NDE during unconsciousness, it did in fact record itself amongst the trillions of bits of information in his brain - no way of telling though!
Yes, there may be something buried deep in the lumber-room of my brain, but, as you say, no way of telling!
I know that something was done to me, because I woke up, and was aware of the result of that something.
Thanks. I don't find it tangled at all. Rationality blows away all other cognitive bias by being the penultimate possible one. The ultimate one is faith. Allowed for by the earliest writings of the Church.
As the deer pants for the water brooks, I've given up consciously listening for the still small voice.
I knew a lot of people who had numinous experiences, thrown into the non-dual, etc., through doing many meditation retreats, and it struck me how, after the excitement faded, their interpretations varied. Some saw it in a Christian light, some Buddhist, some Sufi, some remained atheists. Well, I assume they had similar experiences, but their attitudes were very different. I suppose a lot of it was about personalities.
Desire is not always an obstacle. In Ignatian spirituality God is understood as communicating through our holy desires. Exploring them more fully can reveal a deep inner calling or sense of ministry. This happened to Florence Nightingale when she was 16.
In religious life they are known as attraits - the particular attraction that you have to faith. For some people this can take the form of monastic spirituality through membership of a third order. Personality is very important in how you connect to your spirituality. I often find it helpful to read the book recommendations which people highlight as speaking to them.
Ignatius also writes about experiences of consolation and desolation in the spiritual life. And he advised that you should never change a good resolution during a time of desolation.
Thank you for sharing this Timo. It's very courageous of you. These things do happen in a life changing way But there is constant speech from heaven. Only most of the time we don't notice it.
'Earth's crammed with Heaven
and every common bush afire with God.
But only those who see take off their shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.'
One of my favorites. On Ye Olde Ship, where we could list our location as part of the profile that appeared with each post, my location was "Heaven Crammed Earth."
Thank you for sharing this Timo. It's very courageous of you. These things do happen in a life changing way But there is constant speech from heaven. Only most of the time we don't notice it.
'Earth's crammed with Heaven
How do you decide andtell the difference between your own thinking and'speech from heaven'?
Thank you for sharing this Timo. It's very courageous of you. These things do happen in a life changing way But there is constant speech from heaven. Only most of the time we don't notice it.
'Earth's crammed with Heaven
How do you decide andtell the difference between your own thinking and'speech from heaven'?
This links to Paul's idea of the Spirit testifying with our spirit that we are children of God. It appears in the story of how John Wesley came to faith. And in other places as well.
In the OT you could tell a true prophet from a false one on the basis of whether their words were proved true. Which is why Jonah is so annoyed with God at Ninevah.
GBS' play of the trial of St Joan discusses the question of her voices. She was executed as a witch but subsequently canonised as a saint.
The discernment process for clergy is focused upon the confirmation of a personal sense of vocation by others in the church so that is not ego, nor projection but a response to the still, small voice within.
My favourite quote comes from Giovanni Guereschi who wrote the Little World of Don Camino in 1956: 'If there is a priest anywhere who feels offended by my treatment of Don Camillo then he is welcome to break the biggest candle available over my head. And if there is a communist who feels offended by Peppone he is welcome to break a hammer and sickle on my back. But if there is anyone who is offended by the conversations of Christ I can't help it; for the one who speaks is not Christ, but my Christ - that is the voice of my conscience.'
Well, it may be the coveting is part of the problem. All I know is that, at the same time that it’s brought me great joy - maybe even brought me the idea of joy - it’s also been damnably inconvenient. Christian revelation runs orthogonal to everything else in my life.
As for the ‘never knowing it’ ... well, if you’d told me three months ago that I’d be spending half my time on a Christian social media and the other half pondering the question of how best to pray, I would have thought you were somewhere between ‘patronising’ and ‘insane’. So don’t rule anything out.
Also, blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God. And the dark night of the soul needs to happen for there to be a dawn. But I would imagine those just sound like cliches right now.
Covet. Envy. Yearn. I'm happy... no, content for you. No, acceptant.
(Even tho' my use of 'covet' seemed to make it my fault in your eyes somehow? Or are you just saying just Zen?)
And it's getting on for a thousand and one nights.
Thank you for sharing this Timo. It's very courageous of you. These things do happen in a life changing way But there is constant speech from heaven. Only most of the time we don't notice it.
'Earth's crammed with Heaven
How do you decide andtell the difference between your own thinking and'speech from heaven'?
I knew a lot of people who had numinous experiences, thrown into the non-dual, etc., through doing many meditation retreats, and it struck me how, after the excitement faded, their interpretations varied. Some saw it in a Christian light, some Buddhist, some Sufi, some remained atheists. Well, I assume they had similar experiences, but their attitudes were very different. I suppose a lot of it was about personalities.
I wonder about that assumption. One thing that most people seem to agree on is that such experiences are hard to talk about; and so I wonder if 'numinous' isn't a blanket term that covers a lot of quite disparate experiences united chiefly in that they're unlike 'mundane' (or whatever the opposite of 'numinous') experience.
This links to Paul's idea of the Spirit testifying with our spirit that we are children of God. It appears in the story of how John Wesley came to faith. And in other places as well.
In the OT you could tell a true prophet from a false one on the basis of whether their words were proved true. Which is why Jonah is so annoyed with God at Ninevah.
GBS' play of the trial of St Joan discusses the question of her voices. She was executed as a witch but subsequently canonised as a saint.
The discernment process for clergy is focused upon the confirmation of a personal sense of vocation by others in the church so that is not ego, nor projection but a response to the still, small voice within.
My favourite quote comes from Giovanni Guereschi who wrote the Little World of Don Camino in 1956: 'If there is a priest anywhere who feels offended by my treatment of Don Camillo then he is welcome to break the biggest candle available over my head. And if there is a communist who feels offended by Peppone he is welcome to break a hammer and sickle on my back. But if there is anyone who is offended by the conversations of Christ I can't help it; for the one who speaks is not Christ, but my Christ - that is the voice of my conscience.'
Thank you. I note though that you are quoting the words and opinions of others, but I am more interested in asking how you personally distinguish between your own thoughts and 'speech from God'. It seems perhaps as if you rely on the words of others, rather than your own thinking. And of course all of us rely on the views of those in history and the present whose views we like, and which help us gain knowledge, but I always retain a part of my mind which sorts information into true, false, or unknown.
Oh, yes, sorry - I didn't mean to say that it was! I believe St. Francis in fact thought desire was fundamental. But I think there are many different kinds of desire, and sometimes we get tripped up by them.
Also, just generally @Rublev - thank you for your contributions here. I've found them very valuable. Within religious life there is of course a huge discourse about the best way to pursue the spiritual path and how it's done - and it's easy to forget that.
And of course, one part of that discourse is that one is not always best-placed to judge for oneself about the best way forward!
I wonder if adding the word 'religious' to the phrase 'spiritual way ((or path or life etc) would make the use of the word 'spiritual' much more easily and meaningfully used. It seems to be taken for granted that 'following a spiritual path', or 'had a spiritual experience' must mean it was closely connected to religious beliefs.
That is, however, something I certainly don't do!
You raise a profound question as to how we can distinguish speech from God from our own thoughts.
This will probably vary according to church tradition but one classic answer for Christians as to how God guides us is to consider the five CSs:
(1) Commanding Scripture
(2) Common Sense
(3) Compelling Spirit
(4) Counsel of the Saints
(5) Circumstantial Signs
You asked for a personal answer, so I will give you one. This has very rarely happened to me, but I once went to pray at a cathedral at a time of great personal distress. And the thought suddenly came into my mind: 'My grace will always sustain you.' I knew that this didn't come from me because it was so surprising. And this has often been a great source of consolation to me.
But I often have thoughts that surprise me. In fact, some of them seem outlandish. Some of them are about spiritual stuff, some not. I don't see how this can be taken further, unless one has a prior interpretation ready. I'm not criticizing that since probably we all do it, hence confirmation bias.
Ignatius of Loyola writes about the discernment of the spirits. And a holy desire which is not prompted by the ego will have a sense of rightness about it and leave you with a sense of peace.
His spirituality is both practical and profound. He recommends the practice of the daily Examen which is very helpful for increasing awareness of God: Where have I felt close to the presence of God today and why? And where have I felt the absence of God and why? It reveals to us the particular ways in which we connect to God (nature, Bible study, reading, giving or receiving hospitality, fellowship with others, acts of service, poetry, meditation, etc). And also what God is prompting us to offer to the world through the things that speak life to us.
You raise a profound question as to how we can distinguish speech from God from our own thoughts.
This will probably vary according to church tradition but one classic answer for Christians as to how God guides us is to consider the five CSs:
(1) Commanding Scripture
(2) Common Sense
(3) Compelling Spirit
(4) Counsel of the Saints
(5) Circumstantial Signs
You asked for a personal answer, so I will give you one. This has very rarely happened to me, but I once went to pray at a cathedral at a time of great personal distress. And the thought suddenly came into my mind: 'My grace will always sustain you.' I knew that this didn't come from me because it was so surprising. And this has often been a great source of consolation to me.
You know such thing. Of course it came from you. It wasn't something you'd never heard. It was in there. If the Spirit was at work, It was so ineffably.
I was walking across the park to work four years ago, deconstructing away, and the thought came clear as the day, "I am more than a story.".
I hope above all that my subconscious and whatever circumstantially inspired it is right.
Regarding @SusanDoris’s question about ‘religious’ vs. ‘spiritual’ ... well, I think in a way this goes back to point 9 of my OP. There’s a widespread sentiment, I think, that ‘religion’ and ‘religious tradition’ is a kind of dead hand stifling the living present. But that’s not how I see it at all. I’m grateful that I have so many wells of wisdom and inspiration to draw upon. That doesn’t absolve me of the need to weigh and evaluate and consider them for myself. But it also means I don’t have to reinvent the wheel with my poor resources, going around in circles and pondering questions the Church Fathers and others already raised and started exploring generations ago. I’m not, for instance, going to see further or deeper than Augustine or St. Francis without standing on their shoulders, or being raised by their words. And the more seriously I engage with them, the more I become ‘religious’. Of course, this is where my spiritual journey starts and how it proceeds, not where it ends: it’s not an ipse dixit of ‘Augustine said it, I believe it, and that’s that’. But I can’t really go very far just bootstrapping myself.
Discernment of motive is a case in point. The question of how you know when your motives are pure, of when that voice within is an angel and when it’s a devil, is of course one that many, many Christian thinkers have engaged with. That, as far as I understand it, is what the literature of ‘discernment’ is all about. And if it’s a voluminous literature, it’s because it’s, from a Christian perspective, a complex and urgent thing - certainly not the kind of thing you can just throw your hands up about and say ‘well, I’ve got all sorts of motives. Who knows?’ So I’m grateful that Ignatius amongst others has come up with some better ideas of how one might answer that question.
To look at it another way: the question of discernment is in a way a question of how and in what way we should trust ourselves. Now, if we were to flip this around, and ask, how and in what way should we trust others ... well, we’d get a lot of different and not entirely commensurate answers, with centuries of thought going in particular into legal and financial answers to this. And at that point I don’t think we’d just throw up our hands and say ‘who knows’. I think we’d accept it’s a delicate art, with a lot of contingency built in. And we’d be prepared to accept rules-of-thumb and broad heuristics as provisional answers, with latitude for individual variation.
As I said, it is a profound question. And the expert on discernment of the spirits is Ignatius. His guidance on holy desires and promptings of the Spirit would consider: Is it in line with scripture and Christian tradition? Does it lead you into peace?
If in doubt concerning an important decision then it would be advisable to seek counsel from an experienced spiritual director who could help you to discern it. This is an ancient Christian practice dating back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers.
You know such thing. Of course it came from you. It wasn't something you'd never heard. It was in there. If the Spirit was at work, It was so ineffably.
This is another area where I feel definitions get a bit stretched. I mean, I’m middle-aged. I have a pretty good sense of my own limitations, my own tendencies. I have a well-rehearsed set of techniques for ordering my thinking and my life.
And then, well ... something novel erupts. Suddenly I am thinking unaccustomed thoughts and feeling unaccustomed emotions. I am leaping beyond all points previously surveyed. And I have no account for how this occurred, no sequence I can draw.
Sure, I can say this originated in ‘me’. That’s not wrong - it’s obviously not happening to someone else. But it’s a ‘me’ that is doing a lot of not-me things in a not-me way, and for reasons I cannot provide. So it’s a very curious sort of ‘me’, and I’m not sure how much further saying this was ‘my subconscious’ really gets us. That just seems like a sciencey-sounding way of saying ‘the not-me that is in me’. Which I think is actually pretty compatible with what @Rublev was saying?
Yep, what @ECraigR said. In a 101 course, of course everything seems tidy; it’s designed that way.
After that, things start getting interesting.
After that your courses start with, "Welcome to 201. I know you have heard in 101 that blah blah. But I say unto you, in this course we will see the ways in which that is wrong, and extend it in other ways that were not hinted about."
After that your courses start with, "Welcome to 201. I know you have heard in 101 that blah blah. But I say unto you, in this course we will see the ways in which that is wrong, and extend it in other ways that were not hinted about."
And so on, unto grad school, at which point you discover everyone’s always wrong about everything.
Jesus was God. But He lived on earth as a Spirit filled human who only did what God wanted Him to do. If we were fully open to the guidance of the Spirit then we would do the same all the time. As it is, we only recognise and respond to the promptings of the Spirit some of the time.
My spiritual director once asked me if I had noticed in the gospels how many times Jesus had remarkable encounters when He was actually on His way to do something else. Such as being on His way to visit Jairus' daughter when He encountered the woman with a hemorrhage. He was quite open to being interrupted.
I now have a different understanding of 'interruptions' to my day as God's agenda breaking into my own agenda.
Jesus manifesto was to proclaim the good news to the poor (Luke 4: 16-18; Is 61: 1-2). And attest it by His miraculous deeds of healing the blind, the lame and the deaf (Matt 11: 5; Is 29: 18; 35: 5).
Jesus prayed before every major decision that He made. And so He was aware of God's will unfolding in the circumstances of His daily life through the revelation of the Spirit.
Pay attention to the 'interruptions' and see what you think.
Jesus was God. But He lived on earth as a Spirit filled human who only did what God wanted Him to do. If we were fully open to the guidance of the Spirit then we would do the same all the time. As it is, we only recognise and respond to the promptings of the Spirit some of the time.
My spiritual director
Well, I'm going to ask another question here: How can you tell the difference between a spiritual director and a wise human being who is able to give helpful advice? If a 'spiritual director' has to be one with similar beliefs to yourself, then that would appear to be confirmation bias for both of you.
One can be given advice ad infinitum, but the responsibilityfor the decisions one makes is always one's own.
Yes, a spiritual director is someone who has been trained and certified by their church organisation to exercise their ministry within the Christian tradition. And they are wise human beings who are able to give helpful advice. They can listen to someone tell their story, help them to discern important decisions and resource them in their spiritual life with recommendations about texts of scripture, spiritual reading, ways of praying and retreats.
Thinking and feeling are substantially in the conscious tip of the mental iceberg.
God only influenced Jesus' mind with His nature.
He didn't do His thinking and feeling for Him.
And He certainly hasn't done any of yours.
Sorry, @Martin54. I’m not really sure what you’re saying here. I’m not sure what you think I’m saying. And on any reading I can arrive at in my confusion, I’m not sure how you can purport to know these things.
Jesus was God. But He lived on earth as a Spirit filled human who only did what God wanted Him to do. If we were fully open to the guidance of the Spirit then we would do the same all the time. As it is, we only recognise and respond to the promptings of the Spirit some of the time.
My spiritual director
Well, I'm going to ask another question here: How can you tell the difference between a spiritual director and a wise human being who is able to give helpful advice? If a 'spiritual director' has to be one with similar beliefs to yourself, then that would appear to be confirmation bias for both of you.
One can be given advice ad infinitum, but the responsibilityfor the decisions one makes is always one's own.
I think, Rublev can correct me if I’m mistaken, but I think Rublev meant someone who’s a qualified and certified Spiritual Director. These are people who have gone through training and tend to be sponsored by a larger organization, such as a diocese. I only know about the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic Church, but they’re pretty commonly used in both.
I did a quick google search for 'spiritual director' and this is a brief paragraph I'll quote.
Spiritual direction is the practice of being with people as they attempt to deepen their relationship with the divine,
or to learn and grow in their own personal spirituality. Wikipedia
I find it interesting, and somewhat alarming, to have realised in this latter part of my life how entrenched is the associationthe of the word spiritual with belief in the divine etc , but not associated, as I am sure it should be, with the other, aesthetic, parts of life.
As for such a person having qualifications and training - if that isn't confirmation bias of the beliefs of a Christian faith belief, then I don't know what is. Such a 'spiritual director' one presumes must have a belief which requires100% faith.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. It’s not confirmation bias; these people receive specific training in spiritual direction.
And how do they define this 'spiritual' direction? On what is it based, apart from a belief which requires 100% faith?
Oftentimes they’re therapists and psychologists in their professional lives.
Good for them, but as professionals, they should not, especially in today's much more knowledge based society, be giving direction which includes a religious bias or a faith belief.
Of course the formalized system for Christian spiritual direction takes place within the Christian faith, but there probably exists similar formalized programs in other religions. Most spiritual direction programs I’m familiar with require that a person have undergone spiritual direction themselves for a period of time before even being allowed to begin spiritual direction training.
Well,QED! An unbroken circle - how many break out and take a good look at the non-belief side.
I find it interesting, and somewhat alarming, to have realised in this latter part of my life how entrenched is the associationthe of the word spiritual with belief in the divine etc , but not associated, as I am sure it should be, with the other, aesthetic, parts of life
???
The urge to celebrate and explore the divine is one of the most persistent impulses to artistic expression in the history of humanity. Almost the entire history of Western art attests to this, and of course Islam, Hinduism, and the other world religions have all given rise to rich artistic traditions of their own. The notion that there can or should be some strict separation drawn between the aesthetic and the religious is a relatively recent one, and as far as I can tell comes almost entirely from the atheistic and (post)modernist side. I guess there may be some grim-faced Puritan sect out there that has declared itself against art as such. But if so, they stand well outside the mainstream of religious devotion.
Such a 'spiritual director' one presumes must have a belief which requires100% faith.
Well, of course, one can presume what one likes. Certainly the parish priest who has been acting as a spiritual counsellor to me would be alarmed if I claimed never to have experienced any doubt about the Christian faith, and I’m familiar with many, many Christian writings about doubt, its experience, and how to approach it. I can’t imagine there are many people with pastoral responsibilities who don’t expect to encounter doubt, and counsel others based on their own experience of it.
This may just be a CofE thing; when I described my parents as ‘desultory Anglicans’ to a clergyman yesterday, he laughed and said ‘well, if they were fervent, they wouldn’t really be Anglicans’. But as @mousethief says: you’re overgeneralising.
@SusanDoris -- you are fond of using this buzz phrase "100% faith." So let me ask. Is it all or nothing, or would you say it's possible that something could be 50% faith? 75% faith? 25% faith? Because in my experience nothing is 100% faith, and even less is 0% faith.
Comments
Yes, there may be something buried deep in the lumber-room of my brain, but, as you say, no way of telling!
I know that something was done to me, because I woke up, and was aware of the result of that something.
As the deer pants for the water brooks, I've given up consciously listening for the still small voice.
In religious life they are known as attraits - the particular attraction that you have to faith. For some people this can take the form of monastic spirituality through membership of a third order. Personality is very important in how you connect to your spirituality. I often find it helpful to read the book recommendations which people highlight as speaking to them.
Ignatius also writes about experiences of consolation and desolation in the spiritual life. And he advised that you should never change a good resolution during a time of desolation.
Speech from heaven is in italics.
Yes, that's the one.
@SusanDoris
This links to Paul's idea of the Spirit testifying with our spirit that we are children of God. It appears in the story of how John Wesley came to faith. And in other places as well.
In the OT you could tell a true prophet from a false one on the basis of whether their words were proved true. Which is why Jonah is so annoyed with God at Ninevah.
GBS' play of the trial of St Joan discusses the question of her voices. She was executed as a witch but subsequently canonised as a saint.
The discernment process for clergy is focused upon the confirmation of a personal sense of vocation by others in the church so that is not ego, nor projection but a response to the still, small voice within.
My favourite quote comes from Giovanni Guereschi who wrote the Little World of Don Camino in 1956: 'If there is a priest anywhere who feels offended by my treatment of Don Camillo then he is welcome to break the biggest candle available over my head. And if there is a communist who feels offended by Peppone he is welcome to break a hammer and sickle on my back. But if there is anyone who is offended by the conversations of Christ I can't help it; for the one who speaks is not Christ, but my Christ - that is the voice of my conscience.'
Covet. Envy. Yearn. I'm happy... no, content for you. No, acceptant.
(Even tho' my use of 'covet' seemed to make it my fault in your eyes somehow? Or are you just saying just Zen?)
And it's getting on for a thousand and one nights.
I wonder about that assumption. One thing that most people seem to agree on is that such experiences are hard to talk about; and so I wonder if 'numinous' isn't a blanket term that covers a lot of quite disparate experiences united chiefly in that they're unlike 'mundane' (or whatever the opposite of 'numinous') experience.
Not sure how one would test this ....
Oh, yes, sorry - I didn't mean to say that it was! I believe St. Francis in fact thought desire was fundamental. But I think there are many different kinds of desire, and sometimes we get tripped up by them.
Also, just generally @Rublev - thank you for your contributions here. I've found them very valuable. Within religious life there is of course a huge discourse about the best way to pursue the spiritual path and how it's done - and it's easy to forget that.
And of course, one part of that discourse is that one is not always best-placed to judge for oneself about the best way forward!
That is, however, something I certainly don't do!
You raise a profound question as to how we can distinguish speech from God from our own thoughts.
This will probably vary according to church tradition but one classic answer for Christians as to how God guides us is to consider the five CSs:
(1) Commanding Scripture
(2) Common Sense
(3) Compelling Spirit
(4) Counsel of the Saints
(5) Circumstantial Signs
You asked for a personal answer, so I will give you one. This has very rarely happened to me, but I once went to pray at a cathedral at a time of great personal distress. And the thought suddenly came into my mind: 'My grace will always sustain you.' I knew that this didn't come from me because it was so surprising. And this has often been a great source of consolation to me.
Ignatius of Loyola writes about the discernment of the spirits. And a holy desire which is not prompted by the ego will have a sense of rightness about it and leave you with a sense of peace.
His spirituality is both practical and profound. He recommends the practice of the daily Examen which is very helpful for increasing awareness of God: Where have I felt close to the presence of God today and why? And where have I felt the absence of God and why? It reveals to us the particular ways in which we connect to God (nature, Bible study, reading, giving or receiving hospitality, fellowship with others, acts of service, poetry, meditation, etc). And also what God is prompting us to offer to the world through the things that speak life to us.
Thank you for your reply. I think That Quetzalcoatl has it right.
You know such thing. Of course it came from you. It wasn't something you'd never heard. It was in there. If the Spirit was at work, It was so ineffably.
I was walking across the park to work four years ago, deconstructing away, and the thought came clear as the day, "I am more than a story.".
I hope above all that my subconscious and whatever circumstantially inspired it is right.
Regarding @SusanDoris’s question about ‘religious’ vs. ‘spiritual’ ... well, I think in a way this goes back to point 9 of my OP. There’s a widespread sentiment, I think, that ‘religion’ and ‘religious tradition’ is a kind of dead hand stifling the living present. But that’s not how I see it at all. I’m grateful that I have so many wells of wisdom and inspiration to draw upon. That doesn’t absolve me of the need to weigh and evaluate and consider them for myself. But it also means I don’t have to reinvent the wheel with my poor resources, going around in circles and pondering questions the Church Fathers and others already raised and started exploring generations ago. I’m not, for instance, going to see further or deeper than Augustine or St. Francis without standing on their shoulders, or being raised by their words. And the more seriously I engage with them, the more I become ‘religious’. Of course, this is where my spiritual journey starts and how it proceeds, not where it ends: it’s not an ipse dixit of ‘Augustine said it, I believe it, and that’s that’. But I can’t really go very far just bootstrapping myself.
Discernment of motive is a case in point. The question of how you know when your motives are pure, of when that voice within is an angel and when it’s a devil, is of course one that many, many Christian thinkers have engaged with. That, as far as I understand it, is what the literature of ‘discernment’ is all about. And if it’s a voluminous literature, it’s because it’s, from a Christian perspective, a complex and urgent thing - certainly not the kind of thing you can just throw your hands up about and say ‘well, I’ve got all sorts of motives. Who knows?’ So I’m grateful that Ignatius amongst others has come up with some better ideas of how one might answer that question.
To look at it another way: the question of discernment is in a way a question of how and in what way we should trust ourselves. Now, if we were to flip this around, and ask, how and in what way should we trust others ... well, we’d get a lot of different and not entirely commensurate answers, with centuries of thought going in particular into legal and financial answers to this. And at that point I don’t think we’d just throw up our hands and say ‘who knows’. I think we’d accept it’s a delicate art, with a lot of contingency built in. And we’d be prepared to accept rules-of-thumb and broad heuristics as provisional answers, with latitude for individual variation.
If in doubt concerning an important decision then it would be advisable to seek counsel from an experienced spiritual director who could help you to discern it. This is an ancient Christian practice dating back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers.
This is another area where I feel definitions get a bit stretched. I mean, I’m middle-aged. I have a pretty good sense of my own limitations, my own tendencies. I have a well-rehearsed set of techniques for ordering my thinking and my life.
And then, well ... something novel erupts. Suddenly I am thinking unaccustomed thoughts and feeling unaccustomed emotions. I am leaping beyond all points previously surveyed. And I have no account for how this occurred, no sequence I can draw.
Sure, I can say this originated in ‘me’. That’s not wrong - it’s obviously not happening to someone else. But it’s a ‘me’ that is doing a lot of not-me things in a not-me way, and for reasons I cannot provide. So it’s a very curious sort of ‘me’, and I’m not sure how much further saying this was ‘my subconscious’ really gets us. That just seems like a sciencey-sounding way of saying ‘the not-me that is in me’. Which I think is actually pretty compatible with what @Rublev was saying?
Well, indeed, as I said: under some rather curious definition of ‘you’.
After that, things start getting interesting.
I didn't say there was. I consulted the best clinical psychologist money could buy.
He asked me who thinks what I think. Who feels what I feel.
I got the answers right. Worth the money.
And so on, unto grad school, at which point you discover everyone’s always wrong about everything.
Like I said, interesting. :-)
And even more in the human mind.
Sounds like he wanted to know about your conscious experience. But I thought you were talking about the subconscious, just now?
Heh. And that too sounds compatible with what @Rublev’s been saying .... :-)
God only influenced Jesus' mind with His nature.
He didn't do His thinking and feeling for Him.
And He certainly hasn't done any of yours.
Yes, it turns it all in to metaphor.
Jesus was God. But He lived on earth as a Spirit filled human who only did what God wanted Him to do. If we were fully open to the guidance of the Spirit then we would do the same all the time. As it is, we only recognise and respond to the promptings of the Spirit some of the time.
My spiritual director once asked me if I had noticed in the gospels how many times Jesus had remarkable encounters when He was actually on His way to do something else. Such as being on His way to visit Jairus' daughter when He encountered the woman with a hemorrhage. He was quite open to being interrupted.
I now have a different understanding of 'interruptions' to my day as God's agenda breaking into my own agenda.
And what did God want Jesus to do in every situation and how did He communicate that?
Jesus prayed before every major decision that He made. And so He was aware of God's will unfolding in the circumstances of His daily life through the revelation of the Spirit.
Pay attention to the 'interruptions' and see what you think.
One can be given advice ad infinitum, but the responsibilityfor the decisions one makes is always one's own.
Sorry, @Martin54. I’m not really sure what you’re saying here. I’m not sure what you think I’m saying. And on any reading I can arrive at in my confusion, I’m not sure how you can purport to know these things.
I find it interesting, and somewhat alarming, to have realised in this latter part of my life how entrenched is the associationthe of the word spiritual with belief in the divine etc , but not associated, as I am sure it should be, with the other, aesthetic, parts of life.
As for such a person having qualifications and training - if that isn't confirmation bias of the beliefs of a Christian faith belief, then I don't know what is. Such a 'spiritual director' one presumes must have a belief which requires100% faith.
???
The urge to celebrate and explore the divine is one of the most persistent impulses to artistic expression in the history of humanity. Almost the entire history of Western art attests to this, and of course Islam, Hinduism, and the other world religions have all given rise to rich artistic traditions of their own. The notion that there can or should be some strict separation drawn between the aesthetic and the religious is a relatively recent one, and as far as I can tell comes almost entirely from the atheistic and (post)modernist side. I guess there may be some grim-faced Puritan sect out there that has declared itself against art as such. But if so, they stand well outside the mainstream of religious devotion.
Well, of course, one can presume what one likes. Certainly the parish priest who has been acting as a spiritual counsellor to me would be alarmed if I claimed never to have experienced any doubt about the Christian faith, and I’m familiar with many, many Christian writings about doubt, its experience, and how to approach it. I can’t imagine there are many people with pastoral responsibilities who don’t expect to encounter doubt, and counsel others based on their own experience of it.
This may just be a CofE thing; when I described my parents as ‘desultory Anglicans’ to a clergyman yesterday, he laughed and said ‘well, if they were fervent, they wouldn’t really be Anglicans’. But as @mousethief says: you’re overgeneralising.