I have been having some correspondence with Jhanananda. He has put together a very interesting and useful archive of articles on Ecstatic Buddhism, much of it based either on
his own experiences or on traditional sources. The ecstatic tradition is something that cuts across faith boundaries. There are Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist ecstatics as well as shamanic traditions and many others. It is an important dimension of the religious life. Shan Tao, the great populariser of Pureland Buddhism in China was an ecstatic practitioner as well as being an artist and a saint. At times I have experienced such phenomena myself during periods of particularly intrense meditation practice - as when I was studying Zen Buddhism many years ago - and I probably would not have ventured on the spiritual path at all if it were not for such experiences spontaneously occurring early in my childhood. This seems to be one of the areas where practitioners of different faiths can work together and inform one another without doctrinal distinctions causing much difficulty. Each faith has its vocabulary for the phenomena manifested, but these vocabularies seem to all be grounded in a common human mode of experience. I have also put a pice on Eschatolog that refers to the Christian tradition of ecstatic contemplation deriving from John Cassian who had such an influence on Benedict.
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