Authentic prayer – which is deeply sensible of God, who speaks out of the depths, and in an awareness of the chaos that surrounds us – requires that we move out of the structure into the antistructure. Here the receptive mode of consciousness is operative.
~Urban T. Holmes, III (in A History of Christian Spirituality)
“All true wisdom is only found far from men, out in the great solitude, and it can be acquired only through suffering. Privations and sufferings are the only things that can open a man’s mind to that which is hidden from others.” (Eskimo shaman speaking to the Danish explorer Rasmussen)
The virtue is not in suffering, per se, rather, suffering tears us away from the anesthetization of orderly comfort and forces us into the antistructure with its alternate mode of experiencing God.
~Corinne Ware (in Discover Your Spiritual Type)
The ‘receptive mode’ refers to the theory of bimodal consciousness and is contrasted with the active mode; ‘structure’ and ‘antistructure’ refer to Victor Turner’s anthropological theory that all relationships fall into these two categories. Relationships defined by structure, value status and role and go together with the action mode.
Hi. Do you allow guest posts on juttabluehberger.at ?
In principle yes, but I would first need to see what you write elsewhere. The URL you have given does not tell me much.