NuNs with GuNs

"everything is connected"

under the inluence of > ffacile berlin*

From the use of the "bhanga", or better the "bang!", name often associated to the use of psycoactive substances or various intoxication processes, there has always been alternative ways to reach the ecstasy of senses and other bodily phenomena associated with mystical ecstasy. Some are well reported in the 16th and 17th century, especially those that defy the laws of physics. There are numerous accounts of levitation (floating or flying) and bilocation (being in two places at the same time), and these phenomena are often treated as historical fact. This woman seeks to investigate how cultures define the line between the possible and impossible when it comes to nature. How is the "ïmpossible" constructed?
And can the impossible have a construction in its own impossibility?
Is the mystical experience having life by itself and the person just happens to "tune in" ?


It is somehow clear beyond doubt that in the genuine mystical trance the subject loses, wholly or partially, the awareness of the world and experiences a state of lucidity and self-expansion in which the soul apprehends its oneness with God or a Divine Imminence, variously delineated, attended by a rapture which is unique. The artificially induced states resulting from certain passive types of meditation, arrest of breathing, Khechari mudra, repetition of sounds, gazing at bright objects or the tip of the nose, or other methods of self-hypnosis, used by some well-known mystics too, as for instance Boheme, though alike in external symbology, do not betoken genuine ecstasy and often lead to serious error in evaluating the true condition.


Ecstasies, no less than visions and voices must, they declare, be subjected to unsparing criticism before they are recognized as divine: whilst some are undoubtedly 'of God,' others are no less clearly 'of the devil.' 'The great doctors of the mystic life,' says Malaval, 'teach that there are two sorts of rapture, which must be carefully distinguished. The first are produced in persons but little advanced in the Way, and still full of selfhood; either by the force of a heated imagination which vividly apprehends a sensible object, or by the artifice of the devil. These are the raptures which St. Teresa calls, in various parts of her works, Raptures of Feminine Weakness. The other sort of Rapture is, on the contrary, the effect of pure intellectual vision in those who have a great and generous love for God. To generous souls who have utterly renounced themselves, God never fails in these raptures to communicate high things.""Sometimes both kinds of ecstasy, the healthy and the psychopathic," adds Underhill, "are seen in the same person. Thus in the cases of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. Catherine of Siena it would seem that as their health became feebler and the nervous instability always found in persons of genius increased, the ecstasies may become more frequent; but they were not healthy ecstasies, such as those which they experienced in the earlier stages of their careers, and which brought with them an excess of vitality. They were the result of increasing weakness of the body, not of the over-powering strength of the spirit: and there is evidence that Catherine of Genoa, that acute self-critic, was conscious of this. Those who attended on her did not know how to distinguish one state from the other. And hence on coming to, she would sometimes say, 'Why did you let me remain in this quietude, from which I have almost died?'"*