Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue

Rating:
Summary: Mystical Bargain
Review: It is a bit unseemly to speak of a bargain when it comes to a book on mysticism but this one really is. The original price was [amount]; I can only assume there was an over-printing. The five writers included in this book are some of the most insightful modern thinkers on the subject. Michael Sells treatment of mysticism in Islam makes for rich reflection. He seems to have a noetic understanding of the subject: "The encountering of the secret is not so much a resolution of mystery (transcending duality) through a comprehensive knowledge as it is a deepening of mystery through unresolvable paradox."

Daniel Merkur makes an excellent discussion of the "unitive experience." He takes a cross cultural approach that gives the reader a fair estimate of what the actual experience of mystical union is for the mystic in practical terms: "Unitive visions are clearly variant forms of unitive ideas in which the ideas have undergone symboliztion into pictorial form, much as ideas do during the dreams of natural sleep.

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