Experience is Most Important
"...the need to have continuity from generation to generation...as far as I know, no one has invented a means of handing it on by means of books alone. It's the personal transmission that is most powerful from someone who embodies the message or the experience. So the Christian tradition is not really in books or doctrine or even dogmas, although these are helpful as pointers. The Christian tradition is the *experience* that Christ Jesus had of the Father...as the loving presence. ...there needs to be a training or a place you can go or people you can go to who have the experience and can communicate it..."
and
"The problem is that people get stuck in their journey and don't move beyond the external symbols to the mystery they are meant to communicate. So some people resolve that by walking around it, the real secret is to go through them, using them according to the...but moving beyond them and thus being lifted up on the experience of many people so that one can move into this contemplation of life, the contemplative dimension of life. It is not a rejection of one's tradition, but a moving beyond it, in other words, one's *fulfilling* one's tradition in the most sublime manner as one moves to this common bonding with all spirituality that has reached a certain level of transformation and can transmit that experience without words, since silence is the greatest teacher."
- Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk
Comments
mine's much more intellectual, though. you should be embarrassed.
just out of curiosity, is there another word that should go before the elipse(s?)?
And I, for one, am eternally shamed by my unintellectuality.
Yes. That.
How do you definie "experience"?
The impression i get from this is that 'fulfillment' is akin to 'embodiment of the christ-like experience' that is, as christians attempt to live as Christ did their mind set tends to parallel that of Christ. So fulfillment comes not in some static end goal (e.g. attaining a place in a literal Heaven <-- which was my first thought when i heard 'fulfillment') but in a transistory, temporary state of mind and that mind's associated actions. When people are in this state, their actions will reflect and transmit into others (paralleling what krishnamurti said about change?).
I guess a point of difficulty would be in determing what are the characteristics of a Christ-like life. Bet no-one's ever come up with that one before...
hope that wasn't too much of a ramble.