Hyman Bloom and Mystical Experience

The New York Times today brought news of the death of Hyman Bloom, the Boston-based painter of mystical art. In the obituary is the account of a mystical experience Bloom had in 1939 at age 26. I note this here because it shows, once again, that the mystical is not something ancient, a phenomenon of dark ages or of ages of superstition. It happens to people who are in some way open. Such experiences coincide often enough with artistic and visionary temperaments so that one cannot help but to assume a cause-effect relationship. I usually express this by gesturing with a hand above my head and saying that such people are “open,” as if they had a hole in their skull. This openness manifests in milder forms as well, thus as intuition of a certain kind, and those who have it cannot view the world in the same way as people for whom the region beyond the border is entirely opaque, the wall so solid that not even vibrations reach the hand that inadvertently touches the stones.