The Experience of God

Paths to Transcendence: According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi, and Meister Eckhart

God—the infinite wellspring of being, consciousness, and bliss that is the source, order, and end of all reality—is evident everywhere, inescapably present to us,

In short, one must pray: not fitfully, not simply in the manner of a suppliant seeking aid or of a penitent seeking absolution but also according to the disciplines of infused contemplation, with real constancy of will and a patient openness to grace, suffering states of both dereliction and ecstasy with the equanimity of faith, hoping but not pres

As the source, ground, and end of being and consciousness, God can be known as God only insofar as the mind rises from beings to being, and withdraws from the objects of consciousness toward the wellsprings of consciousness itself, and learns to see nature not as a closed system of material forces but in light of those ultimate ends that open the m

The whole of nature is something prepared for us, composed for us, given to us, delivered into our care by a “supernatural” dispensation.

Late modernity is thus a condition of willful spiritual deafness. Enframed, racked, reduced to machinery, nature cannot speak unless spoken to, and then her answers must be only yes, no, or obedient silence. She cannot address us in her own voice. And we certainly cannot hear whatever voice might attempt to speak to us through her.

and our mechanistic approach to the world is nothing but ontological obliviousness translated into a living tradition.

God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the one truly substantial value at the center of our social universe: the price tag.

contemplative prayer involves the discipline of overcoming, at once, both frantic despair and empty euphoria, as well as a long training in the kind of discernment that allows one to distinguish between true spiritual experience and mere paroxysms of sentiment.