Opening
This Opening section provides an overview of the Beatific Vision and several of the different elements that pertain to mysticism as a whole.
The primary goal, or my primary goal and objective in everything I’m doing with this website, my podcast and my books, is helping to unlock the mysteries of the Beatific Vision of God for those that are unaware of such things. To help provide awareness of this, the goal, of all religious, spiritual meditational practices; to provide answers for those that are already on the narrow path towards this, the goal, whether they know it or not, and if they have not moved any further up the Mount or if they even knew there was a Mount that needed to be climbed, and hopefully help such persons along the ascent, much like Virgil did for Dante in the Divine Comedy.
In that brief paragraph, I’ve given many terms and ideas that you may not be familiar with. I’m assuming you, dear listener and possible pilgrim, have arrived at this website by listening to my podcast. But if you have not listened to my podcast and traversed through the labyrinth of the external reflection of the internal mind called the Internet and have found your way here through some other means, please listen to my Season One Podcast Episode Three, titled: Beatific Vision and Stages. You can also look up the general description of the Beatific Vision in the Catechism of the Catholic Church since this is what the mystical experience and vision of God is called in Catholic Christianity.
If you would like an example of how a Beatific Vision of God is described and what it looks like, please listen to my Season One Podcast Episode One: Introduction and The Ascension to the Temple of the Father. Or, open up your sacred text or dig into your memory of your sacred texts and recall any of the stories or what you may call myths to mind. Those in particular that pertain to another name of this experience, which is a Theophany or, the appearance of God to the human being in some way, or in a non-religious manner, arriving at truth itself. Moses seeing the burning bush, the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, the heavens opening up at Jesus’s baptism, the Apostles’ seeing the Transfiguration of Christ, the risen Christ appearing to the Apostles, the angel Gabriel appearing to Muhammad, Krishna showing Arjuna eternity, the Buddha arriving at the truth when he reached enlightenment, and many, many more such experiences that human beings have had, have, and will continue to have until the end of humanity, along with their attempt at conveying in some way the shape or form of the visionary experience back to the people of their community across the ages and across the world.
As a quick summary, the Beatific Vision of God or whatever the equivalent is within one’s own cultural or religious tradition or truth finding, should be the hope and goal of each and every practitioner that has chosen or stumbled upon the walking of the narrow path. And if you’ve seen some of the images on this website prior to clicking the play button for this audio recording, there are some immediate observations that can be deduced based on the overall shape and form of the patterns that appear throughout each and every tradition and the works they have produced in order to show the pattern and symbol that was and is seen when the experience of the Beatific Vision occurs.
If this understanding hasn’t occurred in your mind yet, I will do my best to explain that which is probably the most difficult to understand in modern times, due to complete and utter godlessness, that which has been difficult to see cross-culturally or across separate and apparently antagonistic religions and worldviews across human time, memory, writing, civilization. This has probably been due to ancient tribal attitudes geared towards exclusivist separation or the external communal quality of the ancient human need of seeking individuation from within, that has led to its expression without as a group, which has then led said groups at this or that point in time to claim that they alone by their means alone have the truth of this or that, or have the truth of this or that concept, notion, idea, of the invisible magical, heavenly, angelic, many gods or the one and only God, and thus have claimed a monopoly on that which is the right of every human being: the search or quest of communing with truth or God.
In addition, as was the case with me due to sinfulness and the attitude of repentance, is the feeling that even if you are a believer, even if you have tasted of the entry point of this vision or what I call the Awakening Experience, that there is such a massive chasm between one’s own self and God that there is simply no hope to cross it. Nothing could be further from the truth for there is nothing closer to us than truth or God. And if you can see the underlying pattern and shape within the images of each and every single piece of work created by human hands that has attempted to show what is seen during this experience, whether the creators of said work had experienced the vision themselves or not, the symbol that has been generated and created along with its reflective discoverable-ness in the external observable world of nature, is one and the same, regardless of any of the aforementioned separationist ideas that all have and or have been guilty of at some point when such separationist ideas have been expressed terribly, and worthy of respect when they’ve been expressed lovingly and honorably at whatever point in time whether through the individual and the creative or pious act; from the group celebrating the individual and creative or pious act; or when they have been combined and blended to honor the individual act as an act of the group and the group act as an act of the individual. Or the mystical way of expressing this: man is the microcosm within the macrocosm of the many layers of the creative act of God, yet the many layers of the creative act of God creating the macrocosm are seen through and within the many layers of what constitutes the microcosm of man. Or the mystery of the one within the many and the many within the one. . .
Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
