In the Light of Mourning: Spiritual Transformations Between Trauma and Presence

I wanted to be a hermit and not see another face

Look upon mine and tell me I was not

All the beauty in this world …

I wanted to live in that cloister of

Light's silence

Because, is it not true, the heart

Is so fragile and shy.

Toward the end of his life Swami Abhishiktananda, a Benedictine monk who also became a Hindu sannyasi, a renunciate devoted to the illumination that flows from absolute awareness not conditioned by time or space, wrote:

The Awakening at the level of anyone who has consciousness is precisely to lose oneself, to forget oneself. The Awakening is the shining out of the splendor—in splendor—of the non-awakening, of the eternal non-born. The non-awakening, the not-born, is manifested by a—what!—a brilliance, a light, a glory that envelops everything. A sense of Beyond, of the Beyond.… (Stuart, 1995, p. 163)

For the mystic, words as markers of permeability to divinity can strain limits of expression as categories are stretched beyond the logic of reason, deform through paradox, and approach the breaking point of sense. In mystic perception the container of language is exceeded through inclusion of that which is beyond