>Me>So his strict redefinition of mysticism merely means that the magical
> >practices of Tantra (ie Martial Arts) and Bhakti (ie weird magicians)
> >are no longer mystical (or rather they are submystical) although the
> >God Learners in their ignorance might have still classified them as
> >mystical.
>Where did these weird definitions come from?
The quoted segment from Greg. As for their inappropriateness, I agree which is why I avoided the Indianisms and used plain english terms later on.
>Tantra is not a martial art,
>and despite its association with women in phone-boxes offering five hour
>orgasms, its a Hindu method of achieving satori through deliberate
>manipulation of taboo and pollution.
Tantra is not just a Hindu practice, it has a Buddhist definition (and there are more Buddhist trantrists than there are Hindu) while Satori is associated with Zen, not Hinduism. However Greg is using Tantra in the sense of enlightenment through the mundane world and that is the sense that I used it given that Martial Artists are demonstrably physical in their approach.
>There's nothing weird about Bhakti.
I realize that. However what was being talked about how we treat weird eastern magicians and martial artists given that they are no longer mystics. In this context, Bhakti refers to weird magicians.
>Most Christian worship is a form of bhakti,
In HQ terms, it's Veneration. The difference is that Veneration is achieved through reason while bhakti is a sacrifice of the self to the god. There's also a gloranthan philosophical point in that the universal deity cannot be worshipped through theistic methods.
>Greg's point makes sense, but the definitions you've offered in expanding
>it only muddy the waters.
I was explaining it for those who didn't know what Greg might be referring to with Tantra and Bhakti and in the context of playing weird magicians and martial artists.
> >In the interests of clarity, I'll start defining a few terms. Firstly
> >these submystical practices are exoteric (outer) as opposed to
> >the esoteric (inner) practices of the mystics. Although many
> >religious practices - such as the Orlanthi devotees - could be
> >grouped as exoteric, I'll restrict the term to those magical
> >practices that are derived from the (mis)application of mystical
> >wisdom to the material and immaterial worlds. Mystics generally
> >view exoteric seekers as people looking in the wrong place.
>Clarity? Doesn't Greg's definition suggest that true mystics reject both
>inner and outer - neither material nor immaterial?
No, since Greg never used inner and outer. I did. Inner and outer was only used in the sense of people doing things correctly (the esoterical mystics) and the people doing things myopically (the exoteric guys). It was not used to describe the three levels of gloranthan reality.
>Real world mysticism
>uses both Kataphatic (roughly, 'pertaining to speech', that which can be
>communicated in words, thoughts and symbols) and apophatic ('beyond
>speech', uncommunicatable, numinous, emptying, negative).
Shades of your infamous espousal of etic and emic. I think it better to use plainer terms even if they do not conform with anthropological theory. Perhaps intelligible and unintelligible.
>This terminology
>may be better suited to the purpose at hand. You can construct a graph with
>kataphatic<-->apophatic on one axis and rational<-->affective on another,
>and graph most religious and spiritual proclivities, though it seems that
>Greg's definition (which frankly, puzzles me a bit), requires a third axis.
Greg's definition requires a third axis because in glorantha, magic and its
effects are demonstrably real and thus intelligible ("feel this lightning
bolt,
punk?") whereas the mystics, by definition, seek the unintelligible ("Neither
this nor that is the straightest answer I can give you, grasshopper").
Exoteric seekers are those that use techniques for experiencing the unintelligible to affect the intelligible world.
>I would be interested in exploring some real world analogues for a *true*
>Gloranthan mystic. I'm a bit of a student of the early Christian mystics -
>the Desert and Eastern fathers and the Philokalia, but the Gloranthan
>distinction Greg makes is one I that is less than clear to me.
The true gloranthan mystic is the one seeks unintelligible reality because the
intelligible world is an illusion (in its coarsest form - see Eurmal
writeup in
Storm Tribe for some commentary on this). By this definition, Neo is not a
mystic because despite what Morpheus says in the first movie, there is an
intelligible world outside the Matrix. Jedi are not mystics because they rely
on a symbiosis with intelligible entities to effect the force. Christian
monks
that go mad in a desert are not mystics for they bring themselves closer to
an intelligible god.
I'll finish on a Gloranthan Koan: is the Wordless Prophet by refusing to engage in intelligible communication seeking closer contact with an intelligible god or the unintelligible? How can we ever know?
--Peter Metcalfe
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