Thank you for reaching deep inside the bag of your inner life, Dougald, to pull out this offering to share with us! I suspect that your impeccability as a wordsmith will always prevent you from making sweeping statements about faith or reality! I am always amazed at the things you remember (harking back to yesterday's Long-Table weekly heartbeat call, where you confessed that Anna had said you remembered everything but the important things (like putting the dustbins out...)) - that totally unpremeditated but heartfelt blurt of mine about "as long as you don't come back a Christian"... There is something in me that would welcome a mutual groping-around-in-the-bag conversation about all of this. It's so deep and so ungraspable and yet so tangible at the same time. You're opening up a very fruitful and subtle and complex terrain here for us to treasure hunt in.
Ah, thank you, Helen – and thanks for that heartfelt moment and all that it unlocked! I look forward to this mutual groping-around-in-the-bag which I know will be part of our conversations here and in other settings in the near future. I hope that the way I'm writing about these things will invite others to write or speak their own stories, giving each other permission to walk these strange edges, each of us an inexhaustible mystery and a doorway to everything.
Hi again, Dougald - yes... the way you're writing about these things... the other day I was greeted by a Perspectiva substack notification in my mailbox, linking to a rather endearing post by Jonathan Rowson on Leading from Confusion - a similar sentiment to what I often feel from you. No soapboxes, only humble headscratching and an invitation to collective inquiry: https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/leading-from-confusion
Oh, such a small world! I've connected up with the Perspectiva community, partly because of my prior connections with folks like Bonnie Roy and Jeremy Johnson... And there are many overlapping like-minded ones there. But the Longer Table still feels to me like more of a heart-hearth! Intimate and softly messy!
I am watching this unfolding -- you, Martin Shaw, Paul Kingsnorth, maybe Caroline Ross--with fascination. And two things occur to me:
1.) that I have a sense of how similar to early Quaker history it all sounds; trying to pry some kinds of core truths away from the greedy grasping hands of the Establishment Church, seeking the "beloved community," being called to "speak Truth to Power."
2.) I'm told that it is not uncommon, within certain castes in Hindu India, for men of a certain age to walk away from their families and their material lives in search of some sort of deepened connection with God...
And along with your "impeccability as a wordsmith," I'm always struck by your deep and abiding kindness. That instinct is surely part of what is sacred to many of us as we explore the ruins of modernity. And a way in which you and Vanessa surely meet on common ground. Thank you for doing this work.
Thank you, Lisa! These are beautiful words and beautiful connections.
I actually found myself dipping into Fox's Journal this week for the first time in years, as I remembered his description of moments of insight that have some affinity with what I experienced that night in the cathedral. Moments like this one:
"As I was walking in a field on a First-day morning, the Lord opened unto me that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ."
I remember that bringing a smile to my face as an undergraduate, lost amid the cleverness of Oxford, studying the literature of the 17th century.
I've heard that, too, about the fourth stage in life in certain Hindu traditions. And it makes me think of the four mountains story that Vanessa tells.
"I have been happy in my reticence, not needing many words for this inheritance, letting people take me as they find me" -
there's something in this statement that really struck me. I recognise myself in it, not in terms of religion, but in the Welsh language I grew up with, and the kind of education I ended up with against all odds. At this point, in this culture, I think almost everybody has some kind of inheritance to come to terms with.
How nice to hear of the way that a line like this can open onto unexpected dimensions. And yes, in so many ways, almost everybody does have a work of coming to terms with our inheritance, and one that isn't well served by the simple categories we often put ourselves or each other into.
I commented on Gunnars blog that fame takes its toll, which you kindly liked. I went further on Smaje's, that like all centralisation, the centralisation of attention in broadcast media is corrosive and its attendant glamour of fame, is bad for us. The substacks that proliferate are a kind of stone on a path to its dissolution- or better, to its distribution back to its proper place between us - as you describe so well.
We see the horror of organised religion atrophied in national and empirical structures unfold before us.
To lose, or walk away from religion whilst attending our wordless needs is our task now - a deeply exciting prospect. I see the unfolding of that attention through intentional production of hands, in the bringing into being of useful, beautiful things that are essential to rooted, embodied life ways. To go the other way is anathema to me, and is top down and centralised. To me the church is the barn, the field, the home. And every street and city and slum. And everyone is in the congregation!
Like others here, I have full respect for the many paths and for your kindness and welcome. I am struck by your careful and intimate unfolding, like a craftsman, not overreaching or digging in, modest and useful. Many thanks brother.
All of this was a homeplace. In this mad wish after a post-apocalyptic siddur I suspect I should try to imagine and innovate, overturn and salvage in one particular, full-breathed at least if maybe more quiet that clamor. Yet, I begin to love the way the One wicks up from so many strings and so many combs afire but unconsumed. I am not not more things everyday.
One thought on the place where language fails. In love with Word as I am, I resist many of the stories of the violence or exhausted nature of word. I know you aren't on that at all. Maybe language fails in proportion to the distance it gets from the heart of its purpose. In my people's stories I hear this idea of naming, calling up from, out for, in to as the words first way. It relational. Our words stammer the more we try to thing the person. Try to say what is life, death, a person, a god with any certainty and th seams start to unstitch. But say to the Fire "Here I am" or from the Fire "Talitha Kum" and every word seems enough to hold worlds.
Illich is right though. It is a dare. When it isn't anymore, it prolly crosses into bullshit. 1/2 cent from me.
Thanks, Andrew, I love this and I'm so glad of your company in this strange homeplace. As usual, you've put your finger on something. Talk of "the failure of language" can be misheard, and what I'm pointing to with those two examples is actually the trickiness of language, including in the Trickster sense, that is part of what is called for at the edges.
One of the turning points of my life was hearing Rowan Williams speak on faith and poetry, and he gets this stuff. (Maybe I'll tell the story of what happened afterwards, sometime.)
The distinction Vanessa borrows from Carl Mika of using language to "word the world" or to "world the world" is here, too. The latter is the living word, nothing if not relational – rather than the label on the pinned butterfly.
Your conversation with Elizabeth on The Sacred Podcast was an important one for me and I find the story of the cathedral (and what you have written here lately) so relevant to my own journey somehow. Thanks for sharing.
This sense of not being able to name the dear friend to whom we speak is very familiar to me, Dougald. You put it succinctly: that feeling I get when the punchline lands and I "get it", in true belly laugh fashion, never harsh or at the expense of anyone else, is the closest I've ever heard it described in words. I too am not, not Christian, but when I 'get the joke', the feeling is warmly embracing - and it feels sacred. Thank you again!
I'm grateful for this bit of writing today, as the new email in my inbox reminded me to come back and finish the previous one. Last night my husband and I stayed up whispering in bed, our concerns about our teen-aged children and the world they are growing into. We both had a strong religious framework and religious community when we were that age, and are in many ways grateful for its gifts. But we lost it, as you so perfectly describe. Not the faith, but the religion. And we were wondering what we can and should do for our children, how to transmit something with no shape or container. How to let go and trust that we may have no part in doing that after all? I'm not able to explain it but I felt that your piece here really danced around similar questions. Thank you
And yeah, "speaking as if to a friend" will take us a long way, I think. I've heard this language used by Sufi friends and I remember Martin Shaw recording a lovely little clip about prayer, well before he hit his conversion experience, where he talked about not needing any language more than "the friend" to describe who you are speaking to. The piece about how we remain mysterious to each other, and giving up any pretence of or need to getting beyond that, is shaped by something Illich says and that Cayley quotes at the beginning of An Intellectual Journey.
The Tuesday Zoom group is part of the Long Table, which is the network of folks who have taken part in one of the Zoom series that Anna and I host as part of a school called HOME. The next one of those series is starting in early November and I'll be sending out the invite soon. Would love to have you as part of the gang for that, if the timings work! (We generally run two groups, one in the morning Swedish time and one in the evening, so as to accommodate different timezones.)
For me, the sacred is both Other and All -- all being everything, or this very world in all its particulars. So it is both other and utterly non-other. The sacred has its alterity completely, and yet it has its identity -- the nearest thing to a useful antonym for alterity I can think of. This is, of course, intensely paradoxical.
"The word "paradox" has its origins in ancient Greek. It comes from the Greek word "paradoxon," which is a combination of "para" (meaning "contrary to") and "doxa" (meaning "opinion" or "belief"). So, "paradox" essentially means "contrary to belief" or "contrary to expectation."
The term was originally used to describe statements or propositions that appeared self-contradictory or went against common knowledge or belief, often serving to challenge conventional wisdom and provoke deeper thought and discussion. Paradoxes have been a significant part of philosophical and mathematical discourse for centuries, and they continue to be used in various fields to highlight apparent contradictions and stimulate intellectual exploration."
-- ChatGPT
What paradoxes often do is reveal what cannot be said -- the Tao which has no name, the unspeakable depth of Mystery. The unthinkable, even.
Maybe we humans aren't capable of remaining in paradox. It's perhaps a place which we can visit, but we cannot make our homes there. Or maybe we can. I don't know. When I am deep into paradox there is a very gentle shock of aliveness which I cannot comprehend. It is shockingly gentle and quiet, but with exclamation points.
It was only after hearing R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion a thousand times that I came to learn that in the American South that phrase is an idiom meaning "becoming very angry". It was around this same time that I also learned that for an American, becoming pissed means one is very angry, while for a Brit it means drunk.
Yes, I only learned what the expression originally meant quite recently! And I read an interview where Michael Stipe says he fears he has changed its meaning forever through the success of the song.
The smell of paradox, or something like it, is one I associate with the proximity of the sacred. Part of why I write about language failing in its vicinity – though, as Andrew and I have discussed in the comments, the failure of language may not be quite the right term, it's more the trickiness of language as we enter this territory.
About the sacred as "Other and All" – to get technical, when you express this "All" in terms of "everything, or this very world in all its particulars", this reminds me of the distinction between Pantheism and Panentheism. If I were to hold you to those words, then I'd say you were something like a pantheist, while I am something like a panentheist, because to the extent that I want to say anything about such mysteries, the "All" in my understanding of the sacred includes but exceeds "this very world in all its particulars". I'm also something like an animist, as I suspect you are, too.
But having said that, I want to remind myself and anyone else that the attempt to master and map and describe any of this through language is a route to madness. I heard a beautiful and succinct summary of the Brothers Karamazov recently from Michael Kurkiola who said, "Ivan looks at the world with all its suffering, asks 'Why?', and goes mad, Alyosha asks instead 'What can I do?'" It's brutal to summarise either the novel or the position for which Michael is speaking quite so briefly, but I want to speak for Alyosha's response, especially for those who, as I do, have an in-built tendency to want to seek to understand it all!
"About the sacred as "Other and All" – to get technical, when you express this "All" in terms of "everything, or this very world in all its particulars", this reminds me of the distinction between Pantheism and Panentheism. If I were to hold you to those words, then I'd say you were something like a pantheist, while I am something like a panentheist, because to the extent that I want to say anything about such mysteries, the "All" in my understanding of the sacred includes but exceeds "this very world in all its particulars".
Throughout my life I've had what can only be called "mystical experiences," and they always resulted in my knowing far less about Ultimate Matters than I did prior. They had a stripping down effect, rather than a building up of knowing or knowledge. Or understanding.
I'm not a theist at all, so pantheism and panentheism are not perfectly apt term to describe what feels like home to me. I think some kinds of mysticism are ultimately non-theistic, which is not identical with atheism. Atheism is very nearly a religion, after all. And my mystical experiences have obliterated any capacity for theology for me. I certainly don't believe in God as some sort of angry bearded guy in the sky, issuing commandments and demanding obedience. And I'm comfortable with being called a "nature mystic" . For me, nature mysticism takes the natural world as sacred, meaning worthy of reverence ... and saturated in unspeakable mystery. One can capitalize Mystery, but doing so alters it not in the slightest. One can hint at the nature of Mystery poetically, but cannot pin it down in words, thoughts, ideas.... Mystery does not present itself as something which might have a science to study it.
" ... includes and exceeds ... " Sure! Yes, of course. It exceeds every map, model or story about What Is, but I'm very reluctant to imagine Ultimate Transcendence as some kind of Beyond or Away... a form of Elsewhere. But that's only because in one of those mystical experiences I was basically shown (it was revealed to me that) there is no Elsewhere in it. There is no division into "two worlds". But now I am speaking of the residue of that experience, not from within it -- fully. It's more like a memory than a present moment experience.
There is a certain way of understanding pantheism and panentheism such that the difference between the apparently two drops away. And my mystical experiences have been of this sort. But, to be honest, I think I've always most wanted to be fully here in this very world, to be fully born as a human being. I can't say I understand what that means. It's a feeling thing.
"But having said that, I want to remind myself and anyone else that the attempt to master and map and describe any of this through language is a route to madness."
It's this experience of this as a category error that results in my saying I cannot be a theist or theologian. It's not to say there is no God -- which is atheism. But it is to say that it doesn't feel right to say I can understand, define, explain, map, model or describe that mystery -- capitalized or not. One cannot grasp the air with one's hands. But this is a terrible way to point at what I mean.
I think the ultimate or essential can only be experienced, felt, lived, aligned with..., but never pinned down with the intellect. And that's fine with me! I'd not have it any other way!
Thank you for reaching deep inside the bag of your inner life, Dougald, to pull out this offering to share with us! I suspect that your impeccability as a wordsmith will always prevent you from making sweeping statements about faith or reality! I am always amazed at the things you remember (harking back to yesterday's Long-Table weekly heartbeat call, where you confessed that Anna had said you remembered everything but the important things (like putting the dustbins out...)) - that totally unpremeditated but heartfelt blurt of mine about "as long as you don't come back a Christian"... There is something in me that would welcome a mutual groping-around-in-the-bag conversation about all of this. It's so deep and so ungraspable and yet so tangible at the same time. You're opening up a very fruitful and subtle and complex terrain here for us to treasure hunt in.
Ah, thank you, Helen – and thanks for that heartfelt moment and all that it unlocked! I look forward to this mutual groping-around-in-the-bag which I know will be part of our conversations here and in other settings in the near future. I hope that the way I'm writing about these things will invite others to write or speak their own stories, giving each other permission to walk these strange edges, each of us an inexhaustible mystery and a doorway to everything.
Hi again, Dougald - yes... the way you're writing about these things... the other day I was greeted by a Perspectiva substack notification in my mailbox, linking to a rather endearing post by Jonathan Rowson on Leading from Confusion - a similar sentiment to what I often feel from you. No soapboxes, only humble headscratching and an invitation to collective inquiry: https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/leading-from-confusion
That's nice! I had an email from Jonathan yesterday inviting me to take part in a conversation with him next month. I shall read that post.
Oh, such a small world! I've connected up with the Perspectiva community, partly because of my prior connections with folks like Bonnie Roy and Jeremy Johnson... And there are many overlapping like-minded ones there. But the Longer Table still feels to me like more of a heart-hearth! Intimate and softly messy!
I am watching this unfolding -- you, Martin Shaw, Paul Kingsnorth, maybe Caroline Ross--with fascination. And two things occur to me:
1.) that I have a sense of how similar to early Quaker history it all sounds; trying to pry some kinds of core truths away from the greedy grasping hands of the Establishment Church, seeking the "beloved community," being called to "speak Truth to Power."
2.) I'm told that it is not uncommon, within certain castes in Hindu India, for men of a certain age to walk away from their families and their material lives in search of some sort of deepened connection with God...
And along with your "impeccability as a wordsmith," I'm always struck by your deep and abiding kindness. That instinct is surely part of what is sacred to many of us as we explore the ruins of modernity. And a way in which you and Vanessa surely meet on common ground. Thank you for doing this work.
Thank you, Lisa! These are beautiful words and beautiful connections.
I actually found myself dipping into Fox's Journal this week for the first time in years, as I remembered his description of moments of insight that have some affinity with what I experienced that night in the cathedral. Moments like this one:
"As I was walking in a field on a First-day morning, the Lord opened unto me that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ."
I remember that bringing a smile to my face as an undergraduate, lost amid the cleverness of Oxford, studying the literature of the 17th century.
I've heard that, too, about the fourth stage in life in certain Hindu traditions. And it makes me think of the four mountains story that Vanessa tells.
Thanks for sharing the journey, Lisa!
"I have been happy in my reticence, not needing many words for this inheritance, letting people take me as they find me" -
there's something in this statement that really struck me. I recognise myself in it, not in terms of religion, but in the Welsh language I grew up with, and the kind of education I ended up with against all odds. At this point, in this culture, I think almost everybody has some kind of inheritance to come to terms with.
Very much looking forward to reading more.
How nice to hear of the way that a line like this can open onto unexpected dimensions. And yes, in so many ways, almost everybody does have a work of coming to terms with our inheritance, and one that isn't well served by the simple categories we often put ourselves or each other into.
I commented on Gunnars blog that fame takes its toll, which you kindly liked. I went further on Smaje's, that like all centralisation, the centralisation of attention in broadcast media is corrosive and its attendant glamour of fame, is bad for us. The substacks that proliferate are a kind of stone on a path to its dissolution- or better, to its distribution back to its proper place between us - as you describe so well.
We see the horror of organised religion atrophied in national and empirical structures unfold before us.
To lose, or walk away from religion whilst attending our wordless needs is our task now - a deeply exciting prospect. I see the unfolding of that attention through intentional production of hands, in the bringing into being of useful, beautiful things that are essential to rooted, embodied life ways. To go the other way is anathema to me, and is top down and centralised. To me the church is the barn, the field, the home. And every street and city and slum. And everyone is in the congregation!
Like others here, I have full respect for the many paths and for your kindness and welcome. I am struck by your careful and intimate unfolding, like a craftsman, not overreaching or digging in, modest and useful. Many thanks brother.
All of this was a homeplace. In this mad wish after a post-apocalyptic siddur I suspect I should try to imagine and innovate, overturn and salvage in one particular, full-breathed at least if maybe more quiet that clamor. Yet, I begin to love the way the One wicks up from so many strings and so many combs afire but unconsumed. I am not not more things everyday.
One thought on the place where language fails. In love with Word as I am, I resist many of the stories of the violence or exhausted nature of word. I know you aren't on that at all. Maybe language fails in proportion to the distance it gets from the heart of its purpose. In my people's stories I hear this idea of naming, calling up from, out for, in to as the words first way. It relational. Our words stammer the more we try to thing the person. Try to say what is life, death, a person, a god with any certainty and th seams start to unstitch. But say to the Fire "Here I am" or from the Fire "Talitha Kum" and every word seems enough to hold worlds.
Illich is right though. It is a dare. When it isn't anymore, it prolly crosses into bullshit. 1/2 cent from me.
Sweet post, Dougald.
Thanks, Andrew, I love this and I'm so glad of your company in this strange homeplace. As usual, you've put your finger on something. Talk of "the failure of language" can be misheard, and what I'm pointing to with those two examples is actually the trickiness of language, including in the Trickster sense, that is part of what is called for at the edges.
One of the turning points of my life was hearing Rowan Williams speak on faith and poetry, and he gets this stuff. (Maybe I'll tell the story of what happened afterwards, sometime.)
The distinction Vanessa borrows from Carl Mika of using language to "word the world" or to "world the world" is here, too. The latter is the living word, nothing if not relational – rather than the label on the pinned butterfly.
Your conversation with Elizabeth on The Sacred Podcast was an important one for me and I find the story of the cathedral (and what you have written here lately) so relevant to my own journey somehow. Thanks for sharing.
I'm glad to hear that, Lesley! Thanks for telling me.
This sense of not being able to name the dear friend to whom we speak is very familiar to me, Dougald. You put it succinctly: that feeling I get when the punchline lands and I "get it", in true belly laugh fashion, never harsh or at the expense of anyone else, is the closest I've ever heard it described in words. I too am not, not Christian, but when I 'get the joke', the feeling is warmly embracing - and it feels sacred. Thank you again!
Thank you, Val!
I'm grateful for this bit of writing today, as the new email in my inbox reminded me to come back and finish the previous one. Last night my husband and I stayed up whispering in bed, our concerns about our teen-aged children and the world they are growing into. We both had a strong religious framework and religious community when we were that age, and are in many ways grateful for its gifts. But we lost it, as you so perfectly describe. Not the faith, but the religion. And we were wondering what we can and should do for our children, how to transmit something with no shape or container. How to let go and trust that we may have no part in doing that after all? I'm not able to explain it but I felt that your piece here really danced around similar questions. Thank you
--Clara
Good story Dougald! Thank you! Speaking as if to a friend is a Wizard-mode I'm familiar with.
Also- please do let me know if there is ever an opening in your Zoom-group.
Glad you enjoyed the story! :-)
And yeah, "speaking as if to a friend" will take us a long way, I think. I've heard this language used by Sufi friends and I remember Martin Shaw recording a lovely little clip about prayer, well before he hit his conversion experience, where he talked about not needing any language more than "the friend" to describe who you are speaking to. The piece about how we remain mysterious to each other, and giving up any pretence of or need to getting beyond that, is shaped by something Illich says and that Cayley quotes at the beginning of An Intellectual Journey.
The Tuesday Zoom group is part of the Long Table, which is the network of folks who have taken part in one of the Zoom series that Anna and I host as part of a school called HOME. The next one of those series is starting in early November and I'll be sending out the invite soon. Would love to have you as part of the gang for that, if the timings work! (We generally run two groups, one in the morning Swedish time and one in the evening, so as to accommodate different timezones.)
Ah! Wonderful! my email is rosie@rosiewhinray.com
For me, the sacred is both Other and All -- all being everything, or this very world in all its particulars. So it is both other and utterly non-other. The sacred has its alterity completely, and yet it has its identity -- the nearest thing to a useful antonym for alterity I can think of. This is, of course, intensely paradoxical.
"The word "paradox" has its origins in ancient Greek. It comes from the Greek word "paradoxon," which is a combination of "para" (meaning "contrary to") and "doxa" (meaning "opinion" or "belief"). So, "paradox" essentially means "contrary to belief" or "contrary to expectation."
The term was originally used to describe statements or propositions that appeared self-contradictory or went against common knowledge or belief, often serving to challenge conventional wisdom and provoke deeper thought and discussion. Paradoxes have been a significant part of philosophical and mathematical discourse for centuries, and they continue to be used in various fields to highlight apparent contradictions and stimulate intellectual exploration."
-- ChatGPT
What paradoxes often do is reveal what cannot be said -- the Tao which has no name, the unspeakable depth of Mystery. The unthinkable, even.
Maybe we humans aren't capable of remaining in paradox. It's perhaps a place which we can visit, but we cannot make our homes there. Or maybe we can. I don't know. When I am deep into paradox there is a very gentle shock of aliveness which I cannot comprehend. It is shockingly gentle and quiet, but with exclamation points.
It was only after hearing R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion a thousand times that I came to learn that in the American South that phrase is an idiom meaning "becoming very angry". It was around this same time that I also learned that for an American, becoming pissed means one is very angry, while for a Brit it means drunk.
All of this is sacred.
Yes, I only learned what the expression originally meant quite recently! And I read an interview where Michael Stipe says he fears he has changed its meaning forever through the success of the song.
The smell of paradox, or something like it, is one I associate with the proximity of the sacred. Part of why I write about language failing in its vicinity – though, as Andrew and I have discussed in the comments, the failure of language may not be quite the right term, it's more the trickiness of language as we enter this territory.
About the sacred as "Other and All" – to get technical, when you express this "All" in terms of "everything, or this very world in all its particulars", this reminds me of the distinction between Pantheism and Panentheism. If I were to hold you to those words, then I'd say you were something like a pantheist, while I am something like a panentheist, because to the extent that I want to say anything about such mysteries, the "All" in my understanding of the sacred includes but exceeds "this very world in all its particulars". I'm also something like an animist, as I suspect you are, too.
But having said that, I want to remind myself and anyone else that the attempt to master and map and describe any of this through language is a route to madness. I heard a beautiful and succinct summary of the Brothers Karamazov recently from Michael Kurkiola who said, "Ivan looks at the world with all its suffering, asks 'Why?', and goes mad, Alyosha asks instead 'What can I do?'" It's brutal to summarise either the novel or the position for which Michael is speaking quite so briefly, but I want to speak for Alyosha's response, especially for those who, as I do, have an in-built tendency to want to seek to understand it all!
"About the sacred as "Other and All" – to get technical, when you express this "All" in terms of "everything, or this very world in all its particulars", this reminds me of the distinction between Pantheism and Panentheism. If I were to hold you to those words, then I'd say you were something like a pantheist, while I am something like a panentheist, because to the extent that I want to say anything about such mysteries, the "All" in my understanding of the sacred includes but exceeds "this very world in all its particulars".
Throughout my life I've had what can only be called "mystical experiences," and they always resulted in my knowing far less about Ultimate Matters than I did prior. They had a stripping down effect, rather than a building up of knowing or knowledge. Or understanding.
I'm not a theist at all, so pantheism and panentheism are not perfectly apt term to describe what feels like home to me. I think some kinds of mysticism are ultimately non-theistic, which is not identical with atheism. Atheism is very nearly a religion, after all. And my mystical experiences have obliterated any capacity for theology for me. I certainly don't believe in God as some sort of angry bearded guy in the sky, issuing commandments and demanding obedience. And I'm comfortable with being called a "nature mystic" . For me, nature mysticism takes the natural world as sacred, meaning worthy of reverence ... and saturated in unspeakable mystery. One can capitalize Mystery, but doing so alters it not in the slightest. One can hint at the nature of Mystery poetically, but cannot pin it down in words, thoughts, ideas.... Mystery does not present itself as something which might have a science to study it.
" ... includes and exceeds ... " Sure! Yes, of course. It exceeds every map, model or story about What Is, but I'm very reluctant to imagine Ultimate Transcendence as some kind of Beyond or Away... a form of Elsewhere. But that's only because in one of those mystical experiences I was basically shown (it was revealed to me that) there is no Elsewhere in it. There is no division into "two worlds". But now I am speaking of the residue of that experience, not from within it -- fully. It's more like a memory than a present moment experience.
There is a certain way of understanding pantheism and panentheism such that the difference between the apparently two drops away. And my mystical experiences have been of this sort. But, to be honest, I think I've always most wanted to be fully here in this very world, to be fully born as a human being. I can't say I understand what that means. It's a feeling thing.
"But having said that, I want to remind myself and anyone else that the attempt to master and map and describe any of this through language is a route to madness."
Indeed. I believe you are referring to a particular kind of category error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake
It's this experience of this as a category error that results in my saying I cannot be a theist or theologian. It's not to say there is no God -- which is atheism. But it is to say that it doesn't feel right to say I can understand, define, explain, map, model or describe that mystery -- capitalized or not. One cannot grasp the air with one's hands. But this is a terrible way to point at what I mean.
I think the ultimate or essential can only be experienced, felt, lived, aligned with..., but never pinned down with the intellect. And that's fine with me! I'd not have it any other way!