Mystical Experiences

The Experience and Its Content

Genuine mystical experiences are all in some ways ecstatic. The word ecstasy comes from Greek roots for “outside” and for “stand,” thus meaning to “stand outside” of oneself, to be taken out of oneself. These states have a passive character in that the subject of the experience has no choice in the matter. Not that he or she wants to have a choice. The experience is joyous. But the ability to resist it isn’t there. You’re falling, and there is no way to arrest a fall.

When I was around seventeen, I once went off to a choir practice in the evening. A ten-block walk lay ahead. At the time I lacked even change enough to take the streetcar. I left on foot because I’d promised to attend. It was almost dark. As I was walking along, such an event unfolded. It came on without any discernible trigger; my state of mind was calm, indifferent, indeed even a little sour. I didn’t really want to go. I was only going to honor a commitment. Nothing changed outwardly, but my perception of reality underwent a drastic change. Energy seemed to flow from everything around me. Trees, bushes, houses, the concrete sidewalk, the black street surface, everything glowed, vibrated, seemed in motion. The effect was immediate and intensely emotional. Within seconds I crying—crying tears of joy. Later, trying to find a way to link the experience to something, anything, that I had seen before, I thought of some of Van Gough’s painting in which the scenes appear to tremble, to be on fire. The principal feeling I had was that “everything’s alive,” and this realization, at that time, made me feel joyous. The feeling lasted for about as long as it takes to walk the length of a city block. After that the feeling faded.

Compared to other accounts that I have read, mine was a relatively mild experience—but for me the strangest and most unusual event of my life. I was a convinced atheist at the time, and, indeed, I continued in those convictions for several more years. You don’t have to be a narrow-gauged materialist to be an atheist. More pronounced experiences of this kind, “stronger versions,” you might say, have a distinctly noetic quality, a strong sense of knowledge is present. Something of that was also present in my feelings, but not as pronounced as in others’, a feeling of exaltation and sense of knowledge. People in these states feel that they finally understand everything; they have the sense of having penetrated the deepest secrets of the universe.

Over time I’ve become convinced that the noetic quality of these experiences is more feeling than knowledge. There is a real difference between feeling that you know and actual knowing. When something is on the tip of my tongue, it isn’t knowledge yet. And in the case of mystics, whatever it is, it stays on the tip of the tongue. Real knowledge leaves something behind, something tangibly graspable. Published accounts or philosophical works of people with the mystical experience, sometimes called the unitive experience, don’t really have content beyond the sort of empty symbolic knowledge we get from mathematics. By way of example I would point to Plotinus’ Enneads in the Graeco-Roman era, the writings of Meister Eckhart in the medieval, and the books of Franklin Merrell-Wolff in the twentieth century. Merrell-Wolff’s works are of great interest precisely because they are modern and more accessible for that reason. In Pathways Through to Space he describes his actual experiences; in The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object he attempts to build an interpretation of his experiences. Anyone hoping to discover in the second work something genuinely interesting about any world that side of the borderzone may as well abandon all hope now. Ain’t nothing there. Or, to put it more charitably, we get the essence in the title: “consciousness without an object” is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. The ultimate content of the Enneads is in a way similar: There is the One. From the One we have Intellect and Soul. This trinity defines Reality. Meister Eckhart’s famous saying: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me,” delivered in one of his sermons, is similar in its ambiguity and inscrutability to most other pronouncements that come from the mystical experience.

To sum up my take on the reports of “unitive” mystics, they rather resemble something analogous to men reporting, after seeing the ocean, that they have seem something awesome and grand, overwhelming, majestic, and beyond the horizon—and never mention water, salt, wind, waves, sand, shorelines, surf, shells, seagulls, or flying fish either.

My own experience, mild although it was, had the same character: powerful feelings, deeply memorable, but containing no meaning beyond a sense of transcending energy everywhere. Everything’s alive. The energetic quality of these experiences is even more tangibly described in Merrell-Wolff’s account. He speaks of a “current” that he clearly felt flowing at times when he had his experience. I sometimes have the feeling that concepts like grace and its Muslim version, baraka—and theories based on emanation—are possibly based on experiences of this sort.

A Personal Point of View

My object to his point should not be misinterpreted. I’m not in the least dismissive of the experience of enlightenment, as it is often called, reported by towering figures like Plotinus, Buddha, Eckhart, or our own Merrell-Wolff. I simply have a point of view which, in its own way, may have some merit.

My view is that our world is very intricately woven, first of all, not merely the life processes built up of stupendous cells—each of which is at least like a major city—but also the elemental world as a whole—many constituents of which have had to be fashioned in the wombs of two different suns in sequence (at least as currently held). Human fate, relationships of love and kinship, memory, pain and suffering, creative life, history, society, and endlessly more—all this shows a picture of tremendous value and complexity the simple dismissal of which as illusion, or as the thinning out of a denser reality, strikes me as of necessity inaccurate at minimum.

I’ve written extensive about life as a vector pointing at something. Consciousness, which seems to have been hard won by a process lasting eons, I take to be a marker of a boundary between dimensions. Its character as a boundary is further substantiated not, I emphasize, by unitary states that point to a kind of dissolving unity with overwhelming Power but, rather, by the much more messy experiences of those who partially touched the neighboring dimension. Let me call them modern shamans: the healers, the psychics, the people who exhibit paranormal gifts. Of these people Swedenborg produced the most coherent reports; here I ignore his work in biblical exegesis, which was his way of trying to make sense of things. The proof of his writings comes indirectly in the form of his paranormal experiences to which very “sound” contemporaries attested. (Kant, for example, had a friend of his gather the evidence.) These “shamans” are messy. Weeds of madness sprout everywhere around them. One concerns oneself with people like this at the risk of one’s own respectability. Yes, people like Swedenborg—who had a distinguished record as a natural scientist—but also people like Edgar Cayce, idiot savants, and other strangelings of the same sort. Carl Jung spent time on that border too. These cases are of great interest precisely because they are messy (like Reality). They indicate transcendence and they do produce a certain minimum content.

It does not surprise me at all that (a) scientists and other respectable thinkers keep their distance, (b) that the Church handles these cases with exceeding caution—after all the Church must guard its respectability too; and (c) that some few perfectly sane people of great curiosity do go there; these are people like me who have nothing to lose.

Yes, there is a real frontier. Unitary visions belong here too but not by any means as the final word on the subject but as transitions toward a better understanding. What little content seeps through the cracks, coming from the shamans, indicates a much richer reality “beyond,” at least as rich as our ordinary cosmos, including vast and coherent societies, environments with similar but yet different laws, etc., of which Swedenborg’s heaven and hell are examples as prepared for the masses of his time; his madness-riddled diaries are the messy raw material. The Taoist tales and Shiite religious accounts belong to this hidden Library of Alexandria.

My own conviction—which I’ll elaborate more later—is that ecstatic and so-called mystical experiences are contact with the lifestream as it rises into this, not as it passes into the next dimension. But to develop that argument I need more space, and this post has become rather long.