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A Prologue to a Conversation on Dialogue, Mysticism and Sainthood

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A Prologue to a Conversation on Dialogue, Mysticism and Sainthood CHAPTER 42 A PROLOGUE TO A CONVERSATION ON DIALOGUE, MYSTICISM AND SAINTHOOD all the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. but the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. this is why i am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether. (the dalai lama) dialogue is the intentional form of relationships in which all beings, both sentient and insentient, are regarded as thou rather than IT. dialogue is a distinct existential path: it is the alternative between mysticism and dualism, and from a religious perspective, it is an existential response to the quandaries of sainthood. in mysticism the distinction between self and other is abolished. sainthood is understood as a practice of mystical renunciation of specific aspects of human nature. dialogical philosophy argues that the presence of god can only be enacted in the between of i and thou, not in the obliteration of the self, nor in the abandonment of nature. through the confirmation of otherness and our saying of thou to all that exists, we become the presence of god on earth. the dichotomy is not between matter and spirit, as either can be regarded as IT or thou. chogyam trungpa spoke of spiritual-materialism. a. j. heschel described the opposite of the sabbath-time as the process by which we relate to the realm of time in the manner we relate to a commodity. that is to say, both spirit and time can be converted to IT, the way that matter can be converted to thou. there is no attribute to matter or spirit that is inherent to either, it is only our ways of relationship with matter and spirit that determines whether they become IT or thou. the dichotomy therefore is not ontological but existential, it is between relating to the world as a tool for materialist consumerism, or as a realm of human embrace. or in martin luther king’s words: “we must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing oriented society” to a “person oriented society.” in other words, from i-it to i-thou. in order to live in a person oriented community it is necessary to engage in a project aimed at the dialogical transformation of society. 243 chapter 42 a prophet is not a mystic nor a saint, but a poet of dialogue. when a prophet seeks a message from god he does not look to the heavens above, but to the eyes of his neighbor. this is why the prophet micah said that all that god wants from us is a life of compassion and simplicity. this is what the biblical term emanu-el means: god is between us, or as i prefer to enunciate it: god is the between of us. god manifests not only as a personal experience of the within, but as a communal way of life. no worship is required, no beliefs and no hidden secrets to be revealed, for there are none other than the task of dis-covering the presence of emanu-el, the god that is between you and me. god is with us by being between us. parting from these dialogical premises, i begin from the primary observation that the essential reality of life is our relationship with all beings. “at the beginning it was the relationship” said martin buber. whether we conceive our humanity as being one with all that exists, or we understand our lives as the manifestation of emptiness clothed in impermanent appearance, in terms of its most concrete and ordinary-mind meaning, the reality of living-in-relationship remains the primordial existential fact. all of martin buber’s philosophy is based on this relational insight. buber stated that all real life is meeting. emannuel levinas argued similarly that ethics is first philosophy, that is to say, we do not arrive at conclusions concerning ethics from a prior examination of the essence of life, but to the contrary, we derive all conclusions of an ontological nature from the relationship with the other. existence preceded essence and therefore the ethical precedes the philosophical. viktor frankl, from within his logotherapy perspective, spoke of the logos of life as the deed of transcending oneself toward the other. it is not the abolishing of the self, but its ethical enactment that opens the gates of healing. for frankl, it is in our choice to turn toward relationship that mental health must focus its attention, not in the strict psychoanalytic self with its various inner-drives. to this analysis i will add the observation that since dialogue precedes existence and existence precedes essence, the life of dialogue is first ethics, and it is therefore also first psychotherapy. the poet e. m. cioran, in his “tears and saints” wrote: /“the difference between mystics and saints is that the former stop at an inner vision, while the latter put it into practice. saintliness suffers the consequences of mysticism, especially on the ethical side. a saint is a mystic, a mystic may not be a saint. ethics plus mysticism gives birth to the intriguing phenomenon of sainthood…” for cioran, the mystical attainment is just one part of the human quest, but without the ethical aspect, that is, without the i-thou relationship, mysticism is existentially irrelevant. 244.
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