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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Myth: You Can’t Communicate Mystical Experiences

I read words like “ineffable” and “incommunicable” used to characterize mystical experiences. Are those words accurate? Should they be used? If mystical experience cannot be put into conceptual language, no other experiences can be communicated either. Really. That’s an obvious fact. Let’s try to unpack this conundrum.

I think that we describe “inexplicable” experiences all the time. If they are inexplicable, then those who hear the description just haven’t had the experience. For the right people, the mystical is just as accessible as is, say, the experience of tennis. Let me give a conceptual description of a tennis maneuver.

Let’s take serving the ball in a tennis match. We begin by assuming a nicely balanced position but inclining forward slightly, our body oriented toward the target across the net, one foot forward, the foot opposed to the hand that holds the racket. The ball is in our other hand. We toss it high from a position about a foot ahead of our face—and toss it somewhat higher than the point we’re able to reach with our racket arm and the racket, both at maximum extension. Even as we make and complete the toss, we reach back with our racket arm and, in one smooth motion execute the following movements: we cock the arm, we stretch our bodies to our maximum height, we bring the racket forward again as we raise it to maximum height and, on its forward sweep, we cause it to impact the ball, which is now falling downward, so that the racket hits the ball with the center of its netted surface. We use the greatest possible force consistent with accuracy to deliver this blow. The ball will then surge forward but on a slight downward vector, travelling in a pleasing ark so that it barely crosses over the net and descends to the targeted area below. As the racket hits the ball, we register a pleasing tactile feedback even as our eyes follow the ball’s trajectory. At our own choice—some pro players excel at this—we can also make a loud exhaling grunt to tell the audience just how hard we tried.

Now the truth of the matter is that this maneuver, as experienced, feels much more mysterious. Someone raised in some inaccessible, hidden mountain valley in Tibet who’s never seen tennis played, has never seen a racket, has no idea of the ball’s size or the court’s layout, unaware of the game’s rules, unfamiliar with words like vector, feedback, and trajectory, will have difficulty understanding what is being said.

Experience itself is necessary to understand its description. Those born blind cannot appreciate the colors of a fresco, those born deaf cannot appreciate the sound of a symphony. We can try to communicate such things by analogy—to something they have experienced—using a richly patterned textile surface for the blind, a video of moving, mixing colors for the deaf.

Mystical experiences can be communicated—and in perfectly ordinary conceptual language—but only those who’ve had them will genuinely understand what’s being described. Those who have higher perception are rare. Those among them skilled at conceptualization even rarer. The great majority of us have these experiences in such muted form, we stand there with mouth open and listen to the babble certain in our mind that those people are just nuts.

What about the thrill of the Dow suddenly surging to 15,000 in a day or the disaster of the S&P 500 plunging 900 points—for a backward Chinese rice farmer? Let's picture him as ignornant of what we call a portfolio and who spent this splendid or disastrous day knee-deep in water wearing a circular but pointed straw hat. For this ordinary and competent farmer, these words might describe the mystical babblings of a western nut. The words don't signal anything.

What is true is that those who have mystical experience do have trouble, at least early on, in formulating their experiences in language. But some can and do do so. And there are those among them who, even having found fitting descriptions, will keep these to themselves—knowing full well that those who haven’t shared the experience will be unable to understand the language no matter how eloquent. The Buddha here comes to mind. The poets are the best at this sort of thing. They are gifted both in tennis and in talk.

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