MEDITATION 421: Matthew Fox: Mystic Union with the Cosmos (7/27/21)

Dear Friends,

We hope that you are safe and well.

In today's Meditation, Matthew Fox reflects on mystical union with the cosmos. He builds on the thinking of Otto Rank, Thomas Berry and Meister Eckhart.

We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in the church, in healthcare, in the workplace--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.

In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that it is God's economy of abundance: when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.

We hope and pray that you find peace, healing, hope and the infusion of joy in your life!

With our love and care,

Ron and Jean

MEDITATION 421: Matthew Fox: Mystic Union with the Cosmos

The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers

Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox

The “Unio Mystica,” Mystical Union & Humankind’s Survival

July 5, 2021

We meditated yesterday on what Otto Rank, recognized as the “father of humanistic psychology” who died young in 1939, had to say about the loss of cosmos in the West and the price we have paid for that.

A cosmic and earth-based consciousness is what aboriginal Eddie Kneebone and indigenous teacher Black Elk and others as well as pre-modern creation mystics teach us is so essential. A psychology not of ego but of microcosm/macrocosm brings psyche and cosmos, humans and earth, into alignment.

Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009) recites his poem, "Earth's Desire," then engages his audience in call-and-response.

Rank says that human beings—including us today–seek “an identity with the cosmic process.” And that our deepest woes stem from our separation from the cosmos. Maybe the earth crisis is calling us back to these truths since “ecology is functional cosmology” (Thomas Berry).

Rank calls this the unio mystica (the mystical union) or “being one with the All” and “in tune with” the cosmos.

The earliest humans knew intimacy with the cosmos. Says Rank:

"The Plight of the Sockeye," photo by Cheryl Stahl, via Flickr.

This identification is the echo of an original identity, not merely of child and mother, but of everything living—witness the reverence of the primitive for animals. In man, identification aims at re-establishing a lost identity with the cosmic process which has to be surrendered and continuously re-established in the course of self-development.

Rank instructs us to look to indigenous peoples—in this instance, to the wisdom and the “reverence” they derive from animals. Reverence is born of awe. With reverence comes respect. How grounded are we in awe, reverence and respect at this time in history?

Regarding our lost cosmic awareness, Rank says:

Psychology is searching for a substitute for the cosmic unity which the man of Antiquity enjoyed in life and expressed in his religion, but which modern man has lost—a loss which accounts for the development of the neurotic type.

Snorkeling promotes an appreciation for grandeur and quenches the thirst for connection. Photo by Stuart Pritchards from Pexels.

Much of the neurosis of our time, Rank feels, is due to the loss of our connection to the cosmos. Anthropocentrism, or species narcissism, fails to satisfy or fulfill the immense human soul.

For Rank, the world “bears the mark of infinity.” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in his moving book The Poetics of Space, describes what living in a cosmos is like and thereby expands on Rank’s insight. For him, the soul experiences immensity and grandeur in the context of the cosmos.

Canning the cosmos in a glass jar, photo by Rakicevic Nenad from Pexels.

We are at home with solitude, and great things well up in the soul because of solitude.

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests but which starts up again when we are alone… We are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense.

Our soul is vast and full of hidden grandeur. In our experiences of unity or grace,

…we discover that immensity in the intimate domain is intensity, and intensity of being, the intensity of being evolving in a vast perspective of intimate immensity.

Intensity, immensity, intimacy—in the human, they all occur at once. That is what mysticism is.

Adapted from Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times, pp. 145f.

Banner Image: "Heaven," photo by Wolfgang Staudt via Flickr.

To view Matthew's video, please click the image. You will be taken to today's post on the Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox website, where you can see the meditation in a larger version and also view Comments from meditation participants and answers to questions that are posed. In this way a kind of community is developing around the DM.

If you can't reach Matthew's video on the website, try his YouTube channel here.

Queries for Contemplation

Do you agree that “modern man and woman” has lost a connection with the cosmos and the result has been great neuroses? And that there are ways to reconnect to the whole? And that our present earth crisis is part of that neurosis?

Pastor's Letter

MEDITATION 421: Matthew Fox: Mystic Union with the Cosmos (7/27/21)