otherbrother
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Got this from internet: that highly reliable source of information!!!:For example, if you're a Christian apophatic, then you do not seek 'spiritual experience'.
The most profound accounts of Christian mystical speculation are not experiential at all.
And a general rule is, if that's what you seek, then you're looking the wrong way ...
At worst it's a form of idolatry, and very possibly 'a wilderness of mirrors'.
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I'm not trying to shut you down – rather that the secular world has appropriated 'spirituality' and 'mysticism' and doesn't really understand either in any profound detail – rather it's been rendered a 'product' to be commercialised and marketed.
I'm happy to discuss it, but we have to sort out the terms first.
What is apophatic spirituality?
The apophatic or negative way stresses God's absolute transcendence and unknowability in such a way that we cannot say anything about the divine essence because God is so totally beyond being.
Now the pragmatist in me is left assuming there must be a few footprints that God leaves behind that we can follow. And I’m assuming those footprints are not only in the Bible. I felt something like being in God’s footprint (and even “presence”) when I was holding my granddaughter’s hand to comfort and support her during a medical procedure done on her. An atheist could have the same experience, but might attribute it simply to “feeling really alive,” which I would agree with also.
In a way, the atheist is honoring God by not even attempting to pretend to know something about God. Denying God’s existence is a way (probably not the best way though) of not contaminating a possible connection to Ultimate Reality by putting it into a little box of some sort.
All ways of suggesting that exploring an Atheist’s “spirituality” (or connectivity or unity or wholeness sense) is a worthwhile experiment and project.