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and went by such names as Sufism, Zen Buddhism, Yoga, and Kabbala. The mystical form of Christianity is found in the words ascribed to Jesus in the Bible, and in the writings of St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Teilhard de Chardin, and Thomas Merton, among others. All of the teachers who have been most influential to me have encouraged me to read works by the mystical poets and leaders of the world's great wisdom and religious traditions.
The thread throughout all of these texts is the quest for union with the sacred, or cosmic consciousness, a term described in the 1901 book of the same name by Richard Bucke, M.D. 6 Many have written that the ultimate goal of all the world's great faiths is ''a transforming communion with the Divine in which the self dissolves to become united with God."7 Sanskrit scholar Ernest Wood, who has translated sacred Indian texts, has said God is a good word if we remember that it is a word of discovery and not a word of definition:
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In science we have words of definition, but here we have a word with which to give direction to the mind, a word which is like a boat, such as Columbus used when he set out to discover something that he did not know.8
"The mystical experience of God, the immediate intuitive experience of God . . . is the very heart and soul of Christianity," according to contemporary Carmelite mystic Mother Tessa Bielecki.9 An unknown medieval author wrote that "God may well be loved but not thought."10 This experience is what I think Jesus, St. Paul, and other mystics are trying to convey. Poetry by Blake, Whitman, Tagore, Gibran, Kabir, Rumi, Basho*, Rilke, and Dickinson reflects the timeless, blissful state of love, gratitude, and connectedness that is characteristic of spiritual mystics the world over.
Philosopher Bertrand Russell tried to define the characteristics of a mystic's perception of reality. In an essay on mysticism and logic published in 1925, he reports that mystics gain information from a source other than the known senses. They perceive time as an illusion, they are aware of a fundamental unity to all things, and they perceive evil as an illusion that

 
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