[Platt] That's all fine and dandy, but rejects out of hand direct experiences that many people have of God and/or Jesus Christ which prompts them to become "born again" Christians.
[Arlo] Should the MOQ privilege the "mystic" revelations of the Christians? Are the "direct experiences" Christians have of "Jesus Christ" more real than those of the Lakota who have "direct experience with White Buffalo Calf Woman"? Or the Scientologists who have "direct experience with extraterrestial thetans"? Or the Muslim who has "direct experience with Allah"? In all these cases, the common foundation is a pre-intellectual, aesthetic, dynamic, "Flow", Zen experience followed by some sort of cultural containment (via language, stories, classifications, names, icons, etc.) The response to "Art" is the same, in that all these are encounters with metaphors that "break" the shackles of socio-intellectual being. The primary "mystic religious" experience is no different that the Dynamic moment Pirsig described when someone hears a new song on the radio. The difference is one of containment. No one experiences a Dynamic Moment from viewing a work of art and then comes back and tells everyone that that one work of art is the One True Work of Art, and that it is "more real" than other works of art. No one says, "because I experienced revelation viewing that one work of art, that must mean that you and everyone else should view and pray for that same experience with that one work of art". Indeed, mystics "who get it", the Gnostics, the Zen Buddhists, the mystics of any religion realize that all religion is a geographic-cultural-historical response to the same indefinable experience of DQ. They do not get trapped in the pitfalls of language or culture or argue "which God is right, and what name He wants to be known by", as they see all religion for what it is... analogy, metaphor, artistic prose to paint a picture of the unseeable, indescribable, uncontainable Void. Those who do no, or can not, see that end up supporting and propping up systems of containment that are used to control and wield power over others, under the guise of advancing "The One True Metaphor". The "Church" becomes another vessel of controlling the sheep, of amassing power, while the mystics who get it just sit by the sidelines and weep. And those mystics know that whether it is the metaphor of a particular religion or the metaphor of a particular song, or a painting, or a sunset, or mediation on a beach, or repairing a motorcycle, or building a rotisserie, "it will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told" (Campbell) that matters. Indeed, the mystic does not look for "born again" experiences in a religion, s/he finds it in all facets of daily activity; from brewing coffee to listening to music, to changing a car's battery, to "fill-in-the-blank". Worry about whether or not the MOQ sees the experience of "born again Christians" as real, just shows you don't get it at all. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
