The centre from which I live, from which I derive unconditional joys, from which and into which the certainties of my existence keep bouncing back and forth I understand to be the practice of a form of mysticism known as Apophatic Ecstasy.
If you want life to get easier, mysticism may disappoint you. If you want it to become much more interesting, you are looking in the right place.
In the practice of pragmatic apophatic mysticism, as in other mystical traditions, one makes a profound surrender. But it does not have to be surrender to a God, nor to an atheism. It is rather surrendering to an experiential process. The process does not involve claims or denials, beliefs or disbeliefs, or any assurance that either truth or self-deception can be verified.
The apophatic mystic has a realisation of being a participant in a mystical process, and through surrender to it, is able to intimately engage and enjoy its dynamics.
Looking at the various mystical traditions, we find analogues of this surrendering process in almost all of them.
Surrender allows us to fall into a psycho-physical disposition which puts us in touch with an astonishing dynamic, one that is naturally found in the ground of our being. We learn how to let our psyche liberate itself.
It sounds naive, but summoning this deliverance is a knack which can be learned. It is demonstrable and is almost always reliable: At every moment you have a natural ability to decide how well you want to feel about being in this world.
Mystical experience can be noted by four characteristics: transiency, passivity, noetic quality, and ineffability. Perhaps also a fifth, that mystical experiences can involve an altered state of consciousness — trance, visions, suppression of cognitive contact with the ordinary world, loss of the usual distinction between subject and object, weakening or loss of the sense of the self, etc.
I am able to say that during my travels so far, I have been infused through various levels of surrender so that I can easily intimately touch into a sense of dynamic unity with absolutely everything. This is a blissful condition of awareness which involves a strong submission to the passive acceptance of the transience of the life I am living inside and outside.
The resulting ability to loose (or forswear) the usual distinction between subject and object, and to be witness on occasion to the weakening or loss of a sense of the self is a gift ranging between mildly amusing, through shades of pleasant, all the way to extremely blissful.
Language for communication is structured on objects, on duality, and on one thing being conditional on another. If I try to tell you what is going on while I am standing in a place filled with pure wonder which is moving me close to shedding tears of joy, what are the words I choose? Matters of the heart, promptings from the soul, upwellings from my spirit and from my core being are hard to procure from memory. Memory made from words, words found in the dictionary, either lack visible meaning, or simply are not here to be found. This is what I understand as “ineffable”.
Such views of the world from a place of quasi-holiness are so beautiful, that I feel compelled to try to share with others. I do this online through my outdoor photography, my art, and in the publication of my EveryNow blog posts in this link: http://www.everynow.blog
[Sources, Raymond Carl Sigrist, “In love with everything – Apophatic Mysticism”, published by Infinity.com
Wikipedia, search for Apophatic Mysticism]
The View at 72+ 