![]() It aims to personally relive the spiritual truth of the Prophet’s message through the mystical path ( tarîqa), beyond the literal data of the revelation (sharia). Just as in Buddhism one rises by degrees to the highest points of the annihilation of individuality by following a path consisting of eight parts, the “noble path”, so Sufism also has its path, its tarîqa, with degrees of perfection. “The spiritual state of baqâ’ (pure “subsistence” out of all form), to which Sufi contemplatives aspire, is the same as the state of moskha, the deliverance of which Hindu doctrines speak, as the extinction ( al-fanâ) of individuality, which precedes “subsistence” is analogous to nirvana. ![]() Muslim mysticism, Sufism, is influenced by Christian monasticism, Persian enlightenment, Hindu ecstasy, and Jewish Kabbalah. ![]() From there, one can reach perfect indifference to the things of the earth, it is the ultimate degree before the union with God. (4) A great figure of monastic spirituality, Saint John Climacus (579-649) formulates the doctrine of hesychasm: perpetual prayer of the soul devoted to contemplation, far from the world, in silence. Orthodox mysticism traces its origins in the experience of the Desert Fathers of the purification of the soul through the prayer of the heart allowing communion with God in solitude. The mystical and contemplative part of religion is greater in Orthodoxy than in Catholicism. ![]() For him, it is a question of allowing man to become by grace what God is by nature. Master Eckhart (1260- 1328) developed a metaphysical mysticism advocating a detachment from everything that is not God. In the West, Christians were slower to develop a mystical tradition compared to the Byzantines and Muslims. In Judaism, the Kabbalah is an esoteric and mystical trend that aims to decipher the book of the creation of the world by the unknowable God. Taoism is a religious and mystical philosophical doctrine that conceives the Tao as a cosmological principle, and a suprasensible and ineffable absolute that can be accessed through techniques of breath control and concentration, the first step in a long process that includes increasingly demanding asceticism. (3) One of his paths is Zen Buddhism, which leads to enlightenment through sitting meditation in the Buddha posture. Its greatest master, Ramakrishna, declared that he had reached the Absolute through each of the great mystical traditions, thus indicating that for him, all paths lead to the same unutterable reality. It advocates the theory of absolute oneness and the equivalence of all religions. “ I try to make go up the divine which is in us to the divine which is in the universe“, were his last words.įor the philosophical school of Vedanta, the self (atman) is of the same nature as Brahman, the ultimate undifferentiated reality. Salvation for him can result only from the recognition of his true nature which is accessible only if one manages to rise above the sensitive condition until the ecstasy, meeting with the divine, source of all happiness towards which the soul melts after being purified. For Plotinus (205-270 AD), a Neoplatonic mystical philosopher, man belongs to the illusory matter through his body but he is a fragment of the supreme intellect and the creative logos through his soul. Representing the highest form of spirituality, mysticism is a personal quest for the hidden God who resides in the heart of each person through the practice of an asceticism aimed at detaching oneself from the world. And there is a kinship between the paths of the Neoplatonist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist mystics. (2) But beyond these differences, all religions worship the same divine reality, but each in its own way. These different perceptions of the divine and the religious traditions they have created have been conditioned by the history, culture, and language of the countries where they were born.
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