Is Ascension possible without a spiritual guide?

[Angrboda]

I think this is a paradox at the heart of most mystic practices, whether they are Muslim, Buddhist, or Taoist.


How does one acquire knowledge of the ineffable (and what, if any, is the difference between knowledge of the ineffable and mere experience of the ineffable).

And equally, along your point, is it possible to help another to know the ineffable. If so, in what sense is it ineffable? If not, then what's the point in teachers like Siddartha and Lao Tzu?

I'm inclined to go several directions with this. First, by denying that what is traditionally termed the ineffable is in fact as ineffable as the poets and the teachers like to make it sound. On the one hand, we have Wittgenstein's admonition that of which we cannot speak we must remain silent, but also his general point that many confusions of philosophy — metaphysics, ontology, epistemology — are in fact confusions of language, instead.

I can't claim to have completed my journey as a mystic myself, but I'm closing in on understandings of spirit which suggest that the ineffable is not so fucking ineffable after all. I look at the teachings of Siddartha and Zhuangzi and so forth, and while having great respect for what insights they had, I am coming to the conclusion, at least with Siddartha, that these thinkers turned off the road of conventional reasoning and into mysticism prematurely. Granted, it's entirely likely that they would have run out of road long before coming to a full understanding of the ineffable through conventional means, but I think it's a mistake to conclude that because the road didn't and couldn't exist in their time, that nothing essential has changed. I think it has. And while I'm not going to claim to have built that road myself, I think it entirely premature to give up the attempt to build it solely because sages millennium ago concluded that no such road did or could exist. (In particular, my impression is that, with Siddhartha, what began as the earnest path of a seeker was at some point corrupted by the allure of the rewards of the path of the charismatic teacher. I can see legitimate reasons for Siddartha's coming to the conclusions he did, but I also see an element in which he was little more than a religious used car salesman, trying to make a buck pitching his ideas and enjoying the accolades of doing so, instead of continuing the search for truth. For whatever reason, in my opinion, Siddartha gave up too early. And while psychoanalyzing the dead is tricky business, I suspect Siddartha knew this at heart.)

Anyway. I'll finish this up later, as I've forgotten where I was going with it.