Q. Fourth?
A. Fourth, for the mystics, time and history are also ultimately unreal, illusory, projections of unenlightened consciousness. Enlightenment consists of emancipation from time. Salvation is found in timelessness. Buddha forbade his disciples to perform miracles because that would have fostered the illusion that the temporal, material world was real and important. But for the Jews, time and matter (which are relative to each other) are real because God created them. In Judaism, God is known and loved and lived within time. Judaism is a historical religion; God has revealed himself in historical events.
For the mystic, salvation consists in going back beyond the birth of the ego to the simplicity of the womb. This is often done through breathing exercises, as in yoga and Taoism, where your breathing becomes like that of a baby, then almost that of an unborn baby, with inhaling and exhaling no longer distinguishable, so that ego and world are no longer distinguishable. The end sought is the realization of our primordial identity with all things. But for the Jews, salvation consists in God doing his thing ("the Day of the Lord") in the future, in time, in history, in the messianic age. Mystics look away from time or back; Jews look at time and forward.
Fifth, Mystics believe God is unknowable, except wordlessly in mystical experience...
Q. Woah! Wait! But isn't that true!? At the end of the day no one really knows whether there is a God or not! Whether he cares or is even affected by what a mere mortal does!
A. Ummm... Remember, the question is not which of these two opinions is right but whether they are the same or opposite. If opposite, Jesus the Jew could not have been a guru.
Q. Oh well...
A. So, as I was saying earlier... Mystics believe God is unknowable, except wordlessly in mystical experience. Jews believe God made himself known publicly in deeds and words, divinely inspired writings.
Sixth, for the Jews, God is the active initiator. That is one reason why he is always imaged as male - as king, husband, warrior...
Q. "...one reason..." What's another reason?
A. Jesus always referred to God the Father and to God the Holy Spirit (and obviously to himself) using only masculine nouns and pronouns.
Q. Ok. Are there more reasons?
A. Yes, but let's not divert onto that path right now...
Q. Sawa. So for the Jews God is the active initiator...
A. Yes. For which reason, religion is not so much our search for God but God's search for us. Our search for God fails: the Tower of Babel; Job 1-37; the false, popular prophets; human expectations for the Messiah. God's search for us succeeds: the call of Abraham, Job 38-42, the true prophet, Jesus.
For the Eastern mystics, God is passive. We find him, not he us. He is timeless; we alone act in time (until we realize that we too are timeless, that we and he [or it] are identical). Thus the God of the mystics is asexual or bisexual, all-inclusive, not other. Only Judaism, of all ancient religions, insisted on exclusively masculine imagery for God... because only Judaism knew God's full otherness and transcendence.
C. S. Lewis writes: "Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder... The pantheist's god does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for him, like a book on a shelf. he will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at his glance... It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone... An impersonal God - well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness inside our own heads - better still. A formless life-force, surging through us, a vast power which we can tap - best of all. But God himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband - that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in "religion" suddenly draw back. Suppose we really found him! We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing he found us?"
8th August 2017