Dialogue: The Sixth and Seventh Mansions (Part 2)

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:22)

Welcome, everyone. I'm grieving and celebrating as we come to the end of our time with the 16th century Christian mystic, Teresa of Avila, and her beautiful book, The Interior Castle. Today will be my final dialogue with Jim looking at Manchians 6 and 7, and getting his help to unpack some of the deep and mystical concepts that Teresa offers us in that book.

Next week, we'll be looking at questions that have come in from you all. So thank you so much for sending those in. We're excited to hear your thoughts and questions next week. But now let's get started with Jim on the 6th and 7th mansion. Okay, welcome Jim, we're back again. Take two or part two, because I've just found these 6th and 7th mansions so deep and there's so many new concepts within them that it was hard to get through them both in one session last week. So we're back again in a dialogue about mansions 6 and 7

So my first question is why do you think the 6th mansion is so long in the book?

James Finley (1:36)

Yes, it's by far the longest.

Kirsten Oates (1:38)

11 chapters, right? It's by far the longest.

James Finley (1:40)

I think intuitively, it seems to me, the reason is that, let's say from the 4th mansion on, there's the beginnings of these, which he calls special favors or mystical states of the experience of God radiating out from the 7th innermost mansion. So in the first three mansions, the experience of God is mediated through our beliefs, through our consolations, through our intentions, and efficacious unto holiness. But in the 4th mansion, there's flowing directly from God in the innermost center of the soul is an unmediated presence of God flowing into and merging with the intimacy of our very presence. So it's a kind of an intersubjective state of oneness beyond thought, beyond emotion, beyond. And it starts out very gradually that way. So you're between two worlds. You're still in the first three. There's this awakening of this non-dual unit of oneness, which creates a state of absorption, which is a kind of a quiet fascination like what's happening. And this absorption then leads to or opens out upon the beginnings of this unit of consciousness. In the fifth mansion, it intensifies to the point that the reflective consciousness illumined by this oneness, the luminosity becomes so pure that the self and reflective consciousness can no longer be the basis for what's happening. And the self goes into a deep sleep.

It's a kind of death, really. It's a kind of a foreshadowing of what happens when we die.

And in that cessation of self-reflection, of awareness and intentional consciousness, this oneness occurs, standing free and clear, like a unit of state of the infinite presence of God, presencing itself as the very presence of the self. It's kind of uncreated in a way. So then when the moment passes, that washes back over the person.

And they weren't there when it happened. But what happened was, one, there's a certainty that they were in God and God was in them. It's like a oneness they can't explain.

But they know it's true. Secondly, the desire to only do God's will. You only want to do God's will in all things. And you're a butterfly with tattered wings. You're in this state of everything suffers from a state of not enoughness. Like this is not the beloved, this is not the beloved, this is not the beloved. Like what is love doing to me here? Like this. There's a fifth mansion.

So what happens in the sixth mansion is that that unitive state, instead of being a temporary event in consciousness that washes back over the self, the unitive event starts becoming ever more pervasively habitual, that is, it starts, instead of there being, what starts to happen in states of rapture is that you're carried off by such wondrous unity that when the rapture passes, it washes back over you and it keeps washing back over you more and more pervasively. And it takes, I think the Six Mansion is the longest because it's like dying of love or the divinization of one's self across every aspect of yourself. So your relationship with other people and what they think of you, your physical health, finding spiritual guidance, one's basic understanding of God and one's self, one's longings, unconsummated longings, and there's no aspect of the self that's left untouched or left unraveled by this love. And I think that's why it's like the totality of the layered interior richness and poverty of one's self, being completely assumed into this love state like this.