The Harried Mystic

Kairos, καιρός, or sacred time, is the companion for whom the mystics yearn.

It has immediacy. It has no history and no future. It breaks upon the scene in a flash, lasting often no longer than a bolt of lightning.

Kairos  is not knowable through philosophy, nor theology. Like a window, to study it is to distort its purpose. The essence of a window is not to be seen in itself but to serve as a vehicle through which to see other things.

Kairos is intense transparency: gazing on the face of the timeless. We can talk about the history of an epiphany (a moment of luminous insight) but its meaning cannot be separated from the context in which it happened  and was later washed  away.

Philosophy is the mind’s gymnasium of concepts in continuous distillation and recombination. Theology is reason brought to our reflections on the noumenous. Both assume that experience is the true object of the reflection.

At their worst, philosophy and theology weave grand abstractions disconnected from mystical experience, becoming a mere banter among academicians who share an antiseptic, stylized and exclusive language. Similarly,  they may become the play-things of professional lecturers and preachers. But, at their finest, they allow experience to create a ferment in mind and an inclusive, alive, accessible language that opens up space for dialogue and discovery.

I always marvel at how physical scientists become playful in their invention of new words to be used as metaphors of phenomena: black holes, quarks, strange attractors, gluons, big bang, big crunch, strings, branes, gravitinos, pions, and, my favorite, the “plum pudding model.” Complex ideas are always communicated with greater power when the language is evocative, metaphorically rich, and iconographic. The most appropriate language by which to appreciate events occurring in kairos is poetry and psalmody.

Kairos is:

• the moment of Christ.
• the moment of Allah,
• the moment of Elohim,
• the moment of the Buddha,
• the moment of Ar-Rahman,
• the moment of Nirankar,
• the moment of Vishnu,
• the moment of Ein Sof,
• the Presence of the Tao,
• the fire of heaven,
• the light of the All,
• the kiss of awakening,
• the embrace of the Beloved.

We respond to the patient Call of the noumenous, the living mythos, that emerges refreshed in every second.

The Spirit, like the wind, is always moving, gathering the leaves of differences all together in a great spiraling Mass. What once was one thing, philosophy, is now many things ( -ologies and -osphies). What was once One and is now many is being gathered together again, but this time with more color and complexity; a miraculous melange of shapes, qualities, and dimensions all converging on a single destination: Awakening.

There is an alchemical change occurring at the place where theology, philosophy, the sciences, poetry, and all artistry and mysticism meet. The Philosopher’s Stone is the product of this grand unification:  an inter-disciplinary, inter-faith, inter-marriage of Heart- Mind- and Spirit. It considers all variables except time.

It is the full flowering of “Kairosophy:” a mythopoeic journey through Mind, offspring of the dynamic fields of force on which everything rests. To bathe in the warm waters of Kairosophy requires a second renaissance, a joyful science embracing diverse styles of thought, languages, metaphors, and content areas.

The between spaces are the nurseries of insights yet unborn.

© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.