Search for the Meaning of Life: Essays and Reflections on the Mystical Experience, Revised Edition

by Willigis Jäger

Helps the reader understand the mystical meaning of life and the nature of transpersonal experience. Also dis-cusses the role of science and mysticism, the search for the Whole, the development of mystical experience in Eastern and Western religion, contemplative prayer as a Christian path, psychological and moral aspects of the inner path, and death as a transformative experience.

Genres: Spirituality

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2003

About the author

Willigis Jäger was a German Catholic priest and Benedictine monk. He was a Zen master who trained and taught in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition. Jäger founded a centre of Zen and contemplation at the Münsterschwarzach Abbey in 1983, and his own Benediktushof, an inter-faith centre of meditation and awareness, in 2003.

Reviews

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like this kind of topic you will love this book...
"The Christian religion is still too bound up in the Cartesian and Newtonian world picture. Only mysticism, evidently, will bear scrutiny from a contemporary standpoint. Mysticism has always moved beyond the four dimensional perspective so as to get a more comprehensive view of the Ultimate Reality."

[David Guy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Willigis Jager is a Benedictine priest and a Zen teacher who used to be affiliated with the Sanbo Kyodan group. This is not a perfect book: it repeats itself a fair amount, and the chapter on Psychological Aspects of the Inner Path really wore me out. It was way too long. But Jager writes with deep understanding about the mystical experience, and connects the esoteric aspects of all religions in a remarkable way. He was censured by the present Pope (back when the man was a Bishop), and that seems a strong credential. His interpretation of the Christian message is that Jesus is an exemplar, not a being to be worshiped; his wish was that we would become like him. He says it most succinctly here:

"The key to all this is not so much imitatio as conformatio. The divine in us has to be laid bare just as it was manifest in Jesus Christ. The redemptive process in us aims at a process of becoming Christ, which in the final analysis is the process of becoming fully human, indeed of "becoming God."

Change a few words around and you have the message of the Buddha as well, and in fact of all the true teachers. They didn't want to be imitated. They wanted us to follow their example.

This is a startling book.

[Ka Mi La · Rating 5 out of 5]

very cool guy.
Didn't find anything neutral about (eternal) life, which would give me more insight than his books. Don't remember about this particular one.