Public
When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann 2012; ch 6
From an anthropological and psychological perspective, the central act of prayer is paying attention to internal experience-thoughts, images, and the awareness of your body-and treating these sensations as important in themselves rather than as distractions from the real business of your life. In some sense, of course, we do this all the time. When we work through things in our mind, when we reenact a conversation, when we daydream, we are paying attention to our inner experience. But prayer asks the person praying to treat those thoughts not as private, internal musings but as in some sense public and externally real speech. This is true for all prayer, but it is true in spades for the kind of evangelical prayer in which God is immediately present and in which he speaks back. The person praying has to learn to use the imagination to experience God as present, and then to treat what has been imagined as more than "mere" imagination. That twofold shift in attention-toward the internal, as the external-is the heart of the skill in prayer.
Some modern prayer manuals spell out a learning process in numbered steps. These steps provide a hodgepodge of practices that direct a person's attention toward their own thoughts; that shape those thoughts in certain ways; and that then push them to treat those thoughts as if they were external speech and action. The book I picked up in a weekend Vineyard course on how to speak with God, Dialogue with God, was the clearest in laying out a progression. The first step is learning what God's voice sounds like when spoken within (reading your Bible so that you recognize the kinds of things God says and when he says them). The second is knowing how to go to a quiet place and still one's own thoughts and emotions. The third is attending carefully in the mind, and to images and thoughts and dreams. The fourth is writing out the dialogue, so that it is clear, external, and remembered: real.3
The Beginner's Guide to Hearing God presents a similar sequence. To hear God, find quiet places to listen-"over a period of time, I learned to get up out of bed (highly important-get out of the bed!) in the middle of the night"; read the Bible to direct the way to pay attention-"if we haven't read our Bible, we should not act like we know where were are going"; actually pay attention-"I really didn't know what to do with all this stuff-impressions, mental snapshots, hunches, knowledge, short thoughts and full phrases that were being released into my heart and mind"; and treat that inner life seriously, as if it matters: remember it, follow it, and store up the memories of the experience. And practice, the author says again and again. Focus internally. Bend the mind to imagine God, and imagine him so vividly that he springs to life outside the mind.4
In the 1970s three Trappist monks inspired by Merton-Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, and William Meninger-distilled the practical points of The Cloud of Unknowing into a method that could be summarized on a page.19 They called it "centering prayer" because they thought that the cloud metaphor was too difficult. "Few of us have been in a cloud," Pennington calmly comments.20 The word center came from Merton: "Monastic prayer begins not so much with 'considerations' as with a 'return to the heart,' finding one's deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being in the presence of God, who is the source of our being and of our life." The three monks thought the phrase represented the movement both of the technique and of its imageless theology: "This place-which we make no attempt at pinpointing physically or imaginatively-is deep within, deep within our spirit. It is the place of encounter with the living Triune God."21
The method begins with the technique that The Cloud's author recommended as the last resort for those who could not focus. You choose one word-perhaps God, perhaps Abba, or love, or peace, or whatever else appeals to you. Then you use the word, as in The Cloud, to block out distraction, like the white noise of the fan that drowns out the street sounds as you work. Thus armed with your word, you sit; you focus on the word; and whenever you find yourself distracted by thoughts and feelings, no matter how good or noble, you gently bring your attention back to the word. The monks suggest that the minimum length of time for such a prayer is twenty minutes each day, and they suggest that you do two such sessions a day.22
Centering prayer is hard. Your mind jumps and frets and starts. You settle in to find God, and instead you construct the weekly shopping list and reach in your imagination for a pen. "Monkey mind," the leader of my prayer group called it, borrowing the Buddhist term. Many people find it difficult just to be still for twenty minutes, to sit without scratching their arms or fiddling with their fingers. To be still and to halt thought is harder still. Your thoughts seem to gather force when you set out to try this method, as if they have been waiting, subdued, to ambush you. "Wandering thoughts surge about my soul like boiling water," said Abba Isaac in the first written description of this mode of prayer.23 The author of The Cloud warns his readers that this will happen at first...The method works, if by works one means that those who become expert practitioners find that the practice changes them. At least, we know that the meditation practiced in Buddhism-until now the only spiritual practice that has been deeply studied as a practice by scientists-has clear physiological consequences. The neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili sought out expert meditators in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to enact their spiritual discipline within the brain-mapping device of a single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) machine. They found that in the peak state of a meditation of an expert meditator, the brain changes significantly. There is decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, an area that orients the self in relation to the world. Buddhist meditation is not centering prayer, but the formal similarity to what people do in centering prayer-shifting attention away from the senses and from thought-is sufficient to suggest that they might have the same kind of bodily impact. Even among nonexperts, meditation can decrease your heart rate, lower your blood pressure, alter your brain wave pattern, improve your immune function, and help you to sustain attention. These are, to borrow a famous phrase, the "relaxation response," and at least for those who can respond to the practice, the effects are real.26...This style of prayer is also deeply controversial within evangelical circles, partly because in the end it just seems too much like Buddhism. The Trappist fathers carefully (and appropriately) placed centering prayer in the rich lineage of the Christian contemplative tradition that descends from the desert fathers. But the technique is essentially the same as in the many forms of Buddhism and Hinduism that independently discovered the practice of being still in thought. Merton understood himself to be bringing Eastern forms of prayer into the West; he thought the West needed the peace that they could bring. When Merton's Contemplative Prayer was reissued in 1996, the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote the introduction.
The history of Christian kataphatic tradition allows us to see, in the loose accumulation of different imaginative practices, which techniques seem to be selected again and again because they work.
In the beginning, imagination-rich prayer was described as a second-tier kind of prayer, a stepping-stone for dull and blinkered humans. Dionysus the Areopagite-he wrote as if he were the convert who followed Paul from Athens in Acts 17:34, but he was in fact an anonymous fifth-century theologian-coined the term kataphatic to identify the type of prayer that would enable Christians to know an unknowable divine through their imagination. Just as a child needs a small chair to clamber up to the bathroom sink, those who see childishly, in Paul's famous phrase, need to imagine God in order to grasp his unimaginableness. Consider, Dionysius wrote, this passage from Psalm 78, when God loses patience with his stiff-necked people and blasts them from the earth: "the Lord awoke, like a strong man, powerful but reeling with wine." God does not drink, and neither does he sleep. Dionysius wrote that when we imagine the immensity of God drunk with wine, we are led into an awareness of the incomprehensible intensity of his presence. That pushes language to its breaking point, the Areopagite argued, and moves us beyond to meet divinity in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.31 To the modern reader, these tracts are a strange but beautiful defense of poetry.
By the era of the medieval monastery, however, these views were neither literary criticism nor metaphysics but explicit technology. For the early desert fathers, sometimes isolated without a written text, perhaps sometimes not even literate, praying to God through scripture involved not reading but recollecting. They had called this mneme theou, "the memory of God," and they understood it as a craft one had to learn. Asked what a man should do to please God, Anthony replied: "Wherever you go, always have God before your eyes; whatever you do, have [before you] the testimony of the holy Scriptures." It was a skill Anthony possessed, as Athanasius wrote: "For he had given such heed to what was read that none of the things that were written fell from him to the ground, but he remembered all, and afterwards his memory served him for books."32 Medieval monastics reconceptualized this mnemonic practice as an intricate skill, fine and delicate and practiced. At the center of this skill stood the making of mental images that could be meant to draw upon a vast personal storehouse of scripture so that thoughts could be entwined within scripture, like a vine carefully trained around a gatepost.
The result of this insistent interest was that medieval monastic society became a visionary culture in which people sought out and celebrated the visual experience of things not present in the material world. From the centuries that stretch between Augustine and the death of the monasteries in the Reformation, we have inherited a rich store of texts that describe, analyze, theorize, and critique what the writers call "visions": vivid image-rich narratives that have their roots in the Bible but that reach out sometimes into fantastic and astonishing realms. For reasons we do not understand, the authors of the great majority of these vision recitals were women, although their critics were mostly men. (At this point, the twentieth-century Carruthers comments: plus ça change.)
What astonished me was how intensely emotional the experience was. Every week when we gathered in our group, the women cried. They talked about their feelings-how moved they were, how frightened, how glad. They seemed rubbed raw by the time they spent in prayer. They wept about how much more intimate their relationship with God had become, how they felt his presence, how he had become more alive. All of them said that they knew Christ better: that before the exercises, their belief had been abstract-despite all that encouragement from the Vineyard to experience God personally. (Admittedly, people decide to do the exercises because they feel that their prayer life is not all it could be. It is also true that a Vineyard congregant's "abstract" belief may be considerably more personal than that of an Episcopalian's.) All of them reported that the exercises made God real for them in new ways.
Julia had been a member of the Vineyard for twenty years before she did the exercises. She was a good, conscientious Christian, and I knew she had been praying daily before our group began. But these exercises made possible something her previous prayer had not. She explained:
Maybe the best analogy would be that before the exercises, it was like I had a relationship with a pen pal. We would write letters to each other. You get to know a pen pal, and you feel like you know them pretty well. But then, imagine after years of writing letters, you finally met that person, really sat down and talked with them and really heard their voice. And experienced how they moved and could hear the color of their voice.
The color of their voice. She knew God with her senses now. She had decided to do the exercises because she could not see Jesus's face in her mind. Now she could. Krista had also been a Christian for twenty years. She worked in ministry and spent much of her time talking to people about God. Still, she thought the exercises drenched her sense of God with feeling and sensation. "I just felt more known than I have in a long time. More connected and more sure and more known to God, more open to Him, more vulnerable."
The surprising lesson from this excursion into the spiritual disciplines is that inner sense cultivation-the deliberate, repeated use of inner visual representation and other inner sensory experience, with interaction, interweaving, and sensory enhancement-has been central to the tradition of Christian prayer. It is central to evangelical prayer. This cannot be an accident.
To be sure, modern evangelical prayer privileges a different interior sense than traditional Catholic prayer: hearing, rather than seeing. Evangelical prayer cultivates the auditory imagination, at least in the way people talk about prayer. Book titles like Hearing God and God Whispers and The Power of a Whisper invite the congregant to reach for God with their ears. The auditory is hardly absent from the earlier tradition; Loyola, after all, presented the conversation, or colloquy, as the most important part of each Spiritual Exercise. Nor is the visual exactly absent in the evangelical setting, as Hybels's visual props and the language of praying in the throne room and at the cross suggest. "If it helps," the pastor said one morning, "imagine that you are kneeling at the cross before Jesus and looking up at him." But the differences are real, and they show up in the way people experience God. Catholics seem to see more often; evangelicals hear.48
These shamans interact with what they imagine; they are told to seek images identified by their mentors, but they elaborate on those externally provided structures with personal, private experiences; and they add details for the many senses.
Inner sense cultivation is also found in Tibetan Buddhism. In his How to Practice, the Dalai Lama presents imagining words and images as central to daily practice: "With a strong determination to attain Buddhahood in order to serve other beings, imagine a Buddha in front of you, or your spiritual teacher as a representation of Buddha. Repeat three times as if you are repeating after him or her."51 In the hill station of Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh, in India, where the remnants of the great Tibetan monasteries gathered in the 1960s, a young scholar set out to document the way the monks summoned the divine. They did so through practiced visualizations in which the mind became the vehicle for the nonmaterial to become manifest and the body was transformed through chant and (as in the monastery of San Marco) gesture. "As [the monk] practices, all the parts grow more and more vivid, until finally he should be able to form a picture of what he is deliberately making vivid and to leave unformed everything else, the picture becoming so vivid that he thinks he could not see it better with his own eyes." The ability to do this, the scholar wrote, is the result of long and "really rather frustrating" practice.52 The monks interact with what they imagine, and they bring all their senses to the task.
One finds these techniques as well in the secluded world of Jewish mysticism, in the practice of kabbalah. The tension between representation and the unrepresentable is fraught in Judaism, yet visualization appears to have been the primary method of mysticism from antiquity. There was a practice known as the "mystical ascent" in the ancient mystical corpus (the Hekhalot) in which the practitioner visualized passage through seven celestial palaces to arrive in the throne room of the divine: "His body is like beryl, His splendor is luminous and glows from within the darkness and the cloud and thick darkness surround Him." Over the centuries these texts are clear about the heart of practice: "Simply put, imagination provides the vehicle through which one can have access to God."53
These days, as the scholar Jonathan Garb reports, the kabbalists of modern Jerusalem still use visualization practices."
---
See Risto's comments in https://plus.google.com/u/0/103530621949492999968/posts/dbFEadqScJH for more on Buddhism: the religious experiences are expected but not desirable from their perspective.
From an anthropological and psychological perspective, the central act of prayer is paying attention to internal experience-thoughts, images, and the awareness of your body-and treating these sensations as important in themselves rather than as distractions from the real business of your life. In some sense, of course, we do this all the time. When we work through things in our mind, when we reenact a conversation, when we daydream, we are paying attention to our inner experience. But prayer asks the person praying to treat those thoughts not as private, internal musings but as in some sense public and externally real speech. This is true for all prayer, but it is true in spades for the kind of evangelical prayer in which God is immediately present and in which he speaks back. The person praying has to learn to use the imagination to experience God as present, and then to treat what has been imagined as more than "mere" imagination. That twofold shift in attention-toward the internal, as the external-is the heart of the skill in prayer.
Some modern prayer manuals spell out a learning process in numbered steps. These steps provide a hodgepodge of practices that direct a person's attention toward their own thoughts; that shape those thoughts in certain ways; and that then push them to treat those thoughts as if they were external speech and action. The book I picked up in a weekend Vineyard course on how to speak with God, Dialogue with God, was the clearest in laying out a progression. The first step is learning what God's voice sounds like when spoken within (reading your Bible so that you recognize the kinds of things God says and when he says them). The second is knowing how to go to a quiet place and still one's own thoughts and emotions. The third is attending carefully in the mind, and to images and thoughts and dreams. The fourth is writing out the dialogue, so that it is clear, external, and remembered: real.3
The Beginner's Guide to Hearing God presents a similar sequence. To hear God, find quiet places to listen-"over a period of time, I learned to get up out of bed (highly important-get out of the bed!) in the middle of the night"; read the Bible to direct the way to pay attention-"if we haven't read our Bible, we should not act like we know where were are going"; actually pay attention-"I really didn't know what to do with all this stuff-impressions, mental snapshots, hunches, knowledge, short thoughts and full phrases that were being released into my heart and mind"; and treat that inner life seriously, as if it matters: remember it, follow it, and store up the memories of the experience. And practice, the author says again and again. Focus internally. Bend the mind to imagine God, and imagine him so vividly that he springs to life outside the mind.4
In the 1970s three Trappist monks inspired by Merton-Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, and William Meninger-distilled the practical points of The Cloud of Unknowing into a method that could be summarized on a page.19 They called it "centering prayer" because they thought that the cloud metaphor was too difficult. "Few of us have been in a cloud," Pennington calmly comments.20 The word center came from Merton: "Monastic prayer begins not so much with 'considerations' as with a 'return to the heart,' finding one's deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being in the presence of God, who is the source of our being and of our life." The three monks thought the phrase represented the movement both of the technique and of its imageless theology: "This place-which we make no attempt at pinpointing physically or imaginatively-is deep within, deep within our spirit. It is the place of encounter with the living Triune God."21
The method begins with the technique that The Cloud's author recommended as the last resort for those who could not focus. You choose one word-perhaps God, perhaps Abba, or love, or peace, or whatever else appeals to you. Then you use the word, as in The Cloud, to block out distraction, like the white noise of the fan that drowns out the street sounds as you work. Thus armed with your word, you sit; you focus on the word; and whenever you find yourself distracted by thoughts and feelings, no matter how good or noble, you gently bring your attention back to the word. The monks suggest that the minimum length of time for such a prayer is twenty minutes each day, and they suggest that you do two such sessions a day.22
Centering prayer is hard. Your mind jumps and frets and starts. You settle in to find God, and instead you construct the weekly shopping list and reach in your imagination for a pen. "Monkey mind," the leader of my prayer group called it, borrowing the Buddhist term. Many people find it difficult just to be still for twenty minutes, to sit without scratching their arms or fiddling with their fingers. To be still and to halt thought is harder still. Your thoughts seem to gather force when you set out to try this method, as if they have been waiting, subdued, to ambush you. "Wandering thoughts surge about my soul like boiling water," said Abba Isaac in the first written description of this mode of prayer.23 The author of The Cloud warns his readers that this will happen at first...The method works, if by works one means that those who become expert practitioners find that the practice changes them. At least, we know that the meditation practiced in Buddhism-until now the only spiritual practice that has been deeply studied as a practice by scientists-has clear physiological consequences. The neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili sought out expert meditators in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to enact their spiritual discipline within the brain-mapping device of a single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) machine. They found that in the peak state of a meditation of an expert meditator, the brain changes significantly. There is decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, an area that orients the self in relation to the world. Buddhist meditation is not centering prayer, but the formal similarity to what people do in centering prayer-shifting attention away from the senses and from thought-is sufficient to suggest that they might have the same kind of bodily impact. Even among nonexperts, meditation can decrease your heart rate, lower your blood pressure, alter your brain wave pattern, improve your immune function, and help you to sustain attention. These are, to borrow a famous phrase, the "relaxation response," and at least for those who can respond to the practice, the effects are real.26...This style of prayer is also deeply controversial within evangelical circles, partly because in the end it just seems too much like Buddhism. The Trappist fathers carefully (and appropriately) placed centering prayer in the rich lineage of the Christian contemplative tradition that descends from the desert fathers. But the technique is essentially the same as in the many forms of Buddhism and Hinduism that independently discovered the practice of being still in thought. Merton understood himself to be bringing Eastern forms of prayer into the West; he thought the West needed the peace that they could bring. When Merton's Contemplative Prayer was reissued in 1996, the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote the introduction.
The history of Christian kataphatic tradition allows us to see, in the loose accumulation of different imaginative practices, which techniques seem to be selected again and again because they work.
In the beginning, imagination-rich prayer was described as a second-tier kind of prayer, a stepping-stone for dull and blinkered humans. Dionysus the Areopagite-he wrote as if he were the convert who followed Paul from Athens in Acts 17:34, but he was in fact an anonymous fifth-century theologian-coined the term kataphatic to identify the type of prayer that would enable Christians to know an unknowable divine through their imagination. Just as a child needs a small chair to clamber up to the bathroom sink, those who see childishly, in Paul's famous phrase, need to imagine God in order to grasp his unimaginableness. Consider, Dionysius wrote, this passage from Psalm 78, when God loses patience with his stiff-necked people and blasts them from the earth: "the Lord awoke, like a strong man, powerful but reeling with wine." God does not drink, and neither does he sleep. Dionysius wrote that when we imagine the immensity of God drunk with wine, we are led into an awareness of the incomprehensible intensity of his presence. That pushes language to its breaking point, the Areopagite argued, and moves us beyond to meet divinity in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.31 To the modern reader, these tracts are a strange but beautiful defense of poetry.
By the era of the medieval monastery, however, these views were neither literary criticism nor metaphysics but explicit technology. For the early desert fathers, sometimes isolated without a written text, perhaps sometimes not even literate, praying to God through scripture involved not reading but recollecting. They had called this mneme theou, "the memory of God," and they understood it as a craft one had to learn. Asked what a man should do to please God, Anthony replied: "Wherever you go, always have God before your eyes; whatever you do, have [before you] the testimony of the holy Scriptures." It was a skill Anthony possessed, as Athanasius wrote: "For he had given such heed to what was read that none of the things that were written fell from him to the ground, but he remembered all, and afterwards his memory served him for books."32 Medieval monastics reconceptualized this mnemonic practice as an intricate skill, fine and delicate and practiced. At the center of this skill stood the making of mental images that could be meant to draw upon a vast personal storehouse of scripture so that thoughts could be entwined within scripture, like a vine carefully trained around a gatepost.
The result of this insistent interest was that medieval monastic society became a visionary culture in which people sought out and celebrated the visual experience of things not present in the material world. From the centuries that stretch between Augustine and the death of the monasteries in the Reformation, we have inherited a rich store of texts that describe, analyze, theorize, and critique what the writers call "visions": vivid image-rich narratives that have their roots in the Bible but that reach out sometimes into fantastic and astonishing realms. For reasons we do not understand, the authors of the great majority of these vision recitals were women, although their critics were mostly men. (At this point, the twentieth-century Carruthers comments: plus ça change.)
What astonished me was how intensely emotional the experience was. Every week when we gathered in our group, the women cried. They talked about their feelings-how moved they were, how frightened, how glad. They seemed rubbed raw by the time they spent in prayer. They wept about how much more intimate their relationship with God had become, how they felt his presence, how he had become more alive. All of them said that they knew Christ better: that before the exercises, their belief had been abstract-despite all that encouragement from the Vineyard to experience God personally. (Admittedly, people decide to do the exercises because they feel that their prayer life is not all it could be. It is also true that a Vineyard congregant's "abstract" belief may be considerably more personal than that of an Episcopalian's.) All of them reported that the exercises made God real for them in new ways.
Julia had been a member of the Vineyard for twenty years before she did the exercises. She was a good, conscientious Christian, and I knew she had been praying daily before our group began. But these exercises made possible something her previous prayer had not. She explained:
Maybe the best analogy would be that before the exercises, it was like I had a relationship with a pen pal. We would write letters to each other. You get to know a pen pal, and you feel like you know them pretty well. But then, imagine after years of writing letters, you finally met that person, really sat down and talked with them and really heard their voice. And experienced how they moved and could hear the color of their voice.
The color of their voice. She knew God with her senses now. She had decided to do the exercises because she could not see Jesus's face in her mind. Now she could. Krista had also been a Christian for twenty years. She worked in ministry and spent much of her time talking to people about God. Still, she thought the exercises drenched her sense of God with feeling and sensation. "I just felt more known than I have in a long time. More connected and more sure and more known to God, more open to Him, more vulnerable."
The surprising lesson from this excursion into the spiritual disciplines is that inner sense cultivation-the deliberate, repeated use of inner visual representation and other inner sensory experience, with interaction, interweaving, and sensory enhancement-has been central to the tradition of Christian prayer. It is central to evangelical prayer. This cannot be an accident.
To be sure, modern evangelical prayer privileges a different interior sense than traditional Catholic prayer: hearing, rather than seeing. Evangelical prayer cultivates the auditory imagination, at least in the way people talk about prayer. Book titles like Hearing God and God Whispers and The Power of a Whisper invite the congregant to reach for God with their ears. The auditory is hardly absent from the earlier tradition; Loyola, after all, presented the conversation, or colloquy, as the most important part of each Spiritual Exercise. Nor is the visual exactly absent in the evangelical setting, as Hybels's visual props and the language of praying in the throne room and at the cross suggest. "If it helps," the pastor said one morning, "imagine that you are kneeling at the cross before Jesus and looking up at him." But the differences are real, and they show up in the way people experience God. Catholics seem to see more often; evangelicals hear.48
These shamans interact with what they imagine; they are told to seek images identified by their mentors, but they elaborate on those externally provided structures with personal, private experiences; and they add details for the many senses.
Inner sense cultivation is also found in Tibetan Buddhism. In his How to Practice, the Dalai Lama presents imagining words and images as central to daily practice: "With a strong determination to attain Buddhahood in order to serve other beings, imagine a Buddha in front of you, or your spiritual teacher as a representation of Buddha. Repeat three times as if you are repeating after him or her."51 In the hill station of Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh, in India, where the remnants of the great Tibetan monasteries gathered in the 1960s, a young scholar set out to document the way the monks summoned the divine. They did so through practiced visualizations in which the mind became the vehicle for the nonmaterial to become manifest and the body was transformed through chant and (as in the monastery of San Marco) gesture. "As [the monk] practices, all the parts grow more and more vivid, until finally he should be able to form a picture of what he is deliberately making vivid and to leave unformed everything else, the picture becoming so vivid that he thinks he could not see it better with his own eyes." The ability to do this, the scholar wrote, is the result of long and "really rather frustrating" practice.52 The monks interact with what they imagine, and they bring all their senses to the task.
One finds these techniques as well in the secluded world of Jewish mysticism, in the practice of kabbalah. The tension between representation and the unrepresentable is fraught in Judaism, yet visualization appears to have been the primary method of mysticism from antiquity. There was a practice known as the "mystical ascent" in the ancient mystical corpus (the Hekhalot) in which the practitioner visualized passage through seven celestial palaces to arrive in the throne room of the divine: "His body is like beryl, His splendor is luminous and glows from within the darkness and the cloud and thick darkness surround Him." Over the centuries these texts are clear about the heart of practice: "Simply put, imagination provides the vehicle through which one can have access to God."53
These days, as the scholar Jonathan Garb reports, the kabbalists of modern Jerusalem still use visualization practices."
---
See Risto's comments in https://plus.google.com/u/0/103530621949492999968/posts/dbFEadqScJH for more on Buddhism: the religious experiences are expected but not desirable from their perspective.
Great post.Feb 11, 2013
