Ways in Mystery Explorations in Mystical Awareness and Life Luther Askeland Ways in Mysterybrings together six remarkable essays on the mystical life by Luther Askeland. Askeland explores in depth the mystical path known as the Way of Unknowing. Ranging over the world's great mystical traditions, Askeland reflects on the teachings of such masters of unknowing as Meister Eckhart, Nagarjuna, St. John of the Cross, Shankara, Dogen, Plotinus, Chao-chou, Tanzen, Angelus Silesius, among others. But Ways in Mystery is not simply a survey of comparative religion and mysticism, it is an original work of profound beauty and insight that takes up the questions of living an authentic spiritual life in the impoverished Iron Age of our historical moment. Askeland writes in the tradition of the mystical literature of both East and West, especially Christianity's mystical theology and Buddhism's Mahayana and Zen. But instead of setting out from some inherited dogmatic claims, he takes as his starting point contemporary experience and contemporary speech. By relating to a particular phenomenon--the question of why the world exists, the present moment, a particular paradox, suffering--his explorations then move in a natural and comprehensible way towards the awareness and experience which lie at the heart of traditional mysticism, especially of those traditions which affirm that "reality" or "God"--that This--exceeds all speech and thought. Read an excerpt from Ways in Mystery Read Book Reviews Suggested Music Selection: Vox de Nube (Voice from the Cloud) by Nóirín Ní Riain.

Paperback, 224 pages List Price: $17 ISBN 1-883991-16-1

Praise of Ways in Mystery:

". . . full of grace, profound insight and wisdom."

-- Publishers Weekly

"In clear direct language, Askeland explores the most profound questions of the mystical life."

-- Booklist

"I find Luther Askeland's principal teaching to be his persuasive insistence on the accessibility of the spiritual life. We can come to know the spirit as all-pervasive in the world, in our minds, in our ordinary life. Absorbed as we generally are in our worlds as they are defined, demarcated, bounded, by the restrictions of language, we keep ourselves insensitive to the ever-present and boundless life in which we have our being. Askeland is in the great tradtion of Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Vedic and Buddhist masters and a shining band of others who have taught the way of inner liberation. What is of the greatest importance is that he does so out of comtemporary experience, with modesty and simplicity. By a fruitful irony, this guide to truths beyond language writes in a vivid and supple prose."

-- Dr. Stanley A. Leavy, author of In the Image of God: A Psychoanalysts' View

An Excerpt from Ways in Mystery:

As we begin like a hatching chick to break out of our customary descriptions, explanations, and evaluations -- out of all our "comprehension" --of our acts and lives, and as we then begin to discern and abide within their action's mystery, we might be said to have "progressed" beyond the assumptions and habits which led us earlier to construct a remote dualistically conceived ideal of mystical action. That advance is twofold. First, our awareness is no longer contained and shaped by the intellect's distinction between the perfect and imperfect act, and between the novice --that is, we ourselves -- and those masters who, having reached the highest summit of the path, flawlessly realize there the ideal of spontaneous mystical action. For now acts are not "perfect" or "imperfect," not "flawless" or "clumsy," not "this" or "that." Now all verbal distinctions are swallowed up in the pure mystery of the act, of the finally unnameable event both you and I right now are. Second, we have now begun to realize that the "mystical" quality of action is not a supreme skill or mastery to be achieved. For "the mystical" is already present in all action, and so our seeking to acquire it is an attempt to duplicate -- superfluously -- what is already there. Instead of seeking to achieve the mystical act, we need only become alert to the mystery which already pervades all our acts, just as we awakened earlier to the mystical quality of the fact that the world is. To be journeying on the way of unknowing, to lose oneself in recollection, to move a ladder or pick up a brush -- all are, first of all, a great mystery. "How wondrous this," exclaims P'ang Chü-shih, "how mysterious! I carry fuel, I draw water."

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