So I am watching an IFC movie called "the Truth About Men and Women", and it gets me thinking about spirituality and my personal belief system choices. In one scene, a couple brings home a girl to meet their friend, who is recently getting over a breakup. This girl is talking about quiet contemplation, meditating as a path towards enlightment. The male in the couple is skeptical and says "I don't like enlightment. It leads to mysticism, which leads to weird prejudices and such" (or something like this). I am trying to figure out why he would believe that mysticism leads to prejudices, because I would think it would lead to the opposite.
I know that I have read of these belief systems through my interest in New Age religion, both from the standpoint of a believer and a skeptic in my lifetime. I suppose in a way that would sum up my entire span of internal spiritual discourse- half believing, half skeptical- and it is because I possess both inclinations that I end up delving deeply into books exploring different belief systems, in order to come up with a religious truth that I can accept without questioning too much; or conversely, maybe that is the point. Maybe we should constantly be questioning our faith and that is acceptable, perhaps it is not a reflection of our reluctance to believe without proof. But I digress here.
I consult with Websters to make sure I am understanding the words completely.
enlighten: to give to the light of fact and knowledge to; to reveal truths to; to free from ignorance, prejudice, or superstition
enlightment: an enlighting or being enlightened
mysticism: 1) the doctrines or beliefs of mystics; specifically the doctrine that it is possible to achieve communion with God through contemplation 2) any doctrine that asserts the possiblity of obtaining an intuitive knowledge of spiritual truths through meditation 3) vague, obscure or confused thinking or belief.
In these terms, it would seem that the man was wrong, or perhaps he was being ironic, or sardonic. It is hard to say and any theory on that would just be a theory and not really worth looking into anyway.
What interests me is where those ideas fall in my personal belief system. When some people talk about enlightment, about meditation, about mysticism, it seems to be in regards to New Age religious beliefs. Even this character, in talking about it, made no mention of God. In fact, most New Age religion books do not mention God specifically. They sometimes refer to the ambiguous "Truth", and is that the same path or not? (After all, wasn't Jesus "the Way, the Truth, and the Light"?) According to Websters, though, the goal in comtemplating life's mysteries is to "achieve communion with God". Or is that just easier than saying "with a higher power, whichever you may call it"?
Sometimes being a mother gets in the way of my thinking process. I have to cut this post short to go feed the baby his lunch. But I want to explore this further, because it cuts right to the heart of what the quest for cosmic truth is about.