Transcendentalism and Gnosticism.

Post Reply New Topic

Ana,

I was going through one of my rent AMORC monographs and they hit on something that I thought was an illustrative poem on contemplation by Jan Van Ruysbroeck. It really caught my attention in just how well he explained the situation and how-to of mystic awakening. Unfortunately it wasn't something I could find online, I just found it referenced that it was an excerpt from Jan's Book of the Twelve Beguines which does look like a great read.

If you want something that leans slightly dualist or at least plays on the boarder between dualism and monism you may want to check out some of the old Christian mystics as a lot of them seem to apply a heavy dose of Platonist logic but still uphold certain angles of sin and grace. Jan looks like a great read, also Carl Von Eckartshausen's Cloud Upon the Sanctuary and a lot of the stuff by by both Dionysus the Areopagite and Pseudodionysus gets plenty of acclaim. Miguel Molinos also wrote a mystic prayer manual ('the Spiritual Guide') during the times of the Spanish inquisition but it goes somewhat without saying that most authors chopped it to pieces to take the so-called heretical content out. Jacob Boehme of course is famous for his writings and I hear Emanuel Swedenborg's name dropped constantly also (which is another author I'm meaning to read more of).

Also, something you really might want to check into - Martinism. It's a Christian mystic/magical order that's heavily linked to Christian chivalry and the like. Most known author of the 'Unknown Philosophers' was second man seen to be in it's line of of creation (the second 'Martin' of Martinism) Louise-Claude de Saint Martin. A really good modern Martinist book, of enough renown to have been owned and studied by the last to Catholic Popes, is Meditations on the Tarot - A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (by Unknown Author, who is actually Valentin Tomberg writing something intended as a post-mortem passing on of what he learned in his life, translated by Robert Powell).

I suppose I can't help bringing up classical Christian mysticism as well as Martinism on the topic because when you start getting into Emerson, Thoreau, Blake, etc.. you're getting into something very same-ish. It's a place where what one might think of as dominantly Eastern features of things like Hinduism and Buddhism find their way into Christianity and Judaism by way of Plato, Pythagoras, etc.. and technically speaking when you walk backward some of the chafing that the bible has gotten over the years from the religious establishment trying to jam a square peg into a round hole the amount of sense the results make over dead letter wagon-circling is a night and day.

Don't know how much you're reading or not reading these days but definitely if you ever have the chance try on MOTT. Aside from Manly P Hall's Secret Teachings I'd have to say MOTT is the other book that IMHO is right up there in terms of eye-opening power.