Reading Mystical Literature

Unity

Mystical Experiences

For thousands of years, probably longer, something very strange
has happened to certain people. It happens, as far as anyone knows,
in all cultures, everywhere. It can happen to practically anyone,
although it is apparently not a random occurrence; those who have
the experience are in some way prepared for it, whether they know
it or not.

No one who has not had the experience knows what it is. Whatever
it is, it is intense. In fact it's so intense that many of those who have
it say, without hesitation, that it is the experience of unifying with
God. Becoming God. Or better put, being God.

Here in the age of modern science, which has been gaining
momentum for about four hundred years, such a description can be
received in several ways - with skepticism, with casual objectivity,
with curiosity. A fairly tame word that science applies to the
experience is "vision," suggesting an experience in the range of a
dream; because of the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, this
admits that the experience has some kind of real meaning, personal
at least. A less generous term for the experience is "hallucination,"
which implies that what happens isn't strictly real - it is a product
of a fantasy of the brain, which is after all known by scientists to be
a complex system of chemical interactions. In between dream and
hallucination is the Freudian possibility that the experiencer is
simply emotionally or mentally ill; the experience is a symptom of
an acute neurosis, or worse, psychosis. "Last night I was one with
God," the woman says, and the psychiatrist thinks, "A possible
schizophrenia."

But if you have any sort of religious feeling - as William James
puts it - you cannot hear a sentence like, "union with God" and
remain casual. God, in whatever sense you understand the word, is
much larger than casual, and the testimonies given by those who
have this experience state unequivocally that a reality more real
than the real is entered during this state of consciousness.

The experience is referred to generally by philosophers and
religious people as "mystical union," and is the central experience in
that large, awkward and foggy area of inquiry we call "mysticism."
The classic mystical experience has been taken seriously by millions
of people for millennia, from charismatic religious leaders like
Buddha to poets of extraordinary genius like Dante. It may be seen
as the human experience of central importance in Plato, who is in
many ways the prime shaper of the way we view reality in the
Western world. In the modern age, it is of central concern to many
of our most influential thinkers and scientists, including William
James and scientists like Carl Jung, Erwin Schroedinger and, indeed,
Albert Einstein.

The Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell describes what happened
to him during the return voyage from the Moon:

A wonderful quietness drifted into the cabin, the satisfying glow of
a job well done. … I could lie back in the weightlessness and watch
the slow progress of the heavens through the module window. My
mind ebbed into that quiet state I had longed for … There was a vast
tranquility, a growing sense of wonder as I looked out the window,
but not a hint of what was about to happen.

Perhaps it was the disorienting, or reorienting effect of a rotating
environment, while the heavens and earth tumbled alternately in
and out of view in the small capsule window … But I don't think so.
The sensation was altogether foreign. Somehow I felt tuned in to
something much larger than myself, something much larger than
the planet in the window. Something incomprehensibly big.

… [A]s I looked beyond the earth itself to the magnificence of the
larger scene, there was a recognition that the nature of the universe
was not as I had been taught. My understanding of the separate
distinctness and the relative independence of movement of those
cosmic bodies was shattered. There was an upwelling of fresh
insight coupled with a feeling of ubiquitous harmony - a sense of
interconnectedness with the celestial bodies surrounding our
spacecraft.

… I experienced what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. I
not only saw the connectedness, I felt it and experienced it
sentiently. I was overwhelmed with the sensation of physically and
mentally extending out into the cosmos. (Mitchell 6-7)

The mystical experience - or at least, its power - has been taken
seriously throughout history not only by those who have it or
acknowledge its spiritual importance, but also by those with other
concerns. Hallaj, the ninth-century Persian poet, was beheaded for
saying, "I am God." Jesus was put to death for saying the same thing,
or for others saying so, depending on which Gospel you read.
Socrates was put to death late in his life for reasons remarkably
similar to the reasons Jesus was crucified, and his teachings grew
from a certainty about the validity and meaning of mystical
experience.

Probably millions of intelligent people, from Parmenides and
Lao-tse to Jalal al-Din Rumi to Walt Whitman and Annie Dillard
have put their minds full focus to understanding what this
experience is about, and trying to give approximations of its
intensity and meaning.

No one has succeeded. But there are ways of identifying its
presence in stories, poems, essays and autobiographical writings,
and this book outlines some of those ways. It also looks at some of
the most important places the mystical experience is talked about,
and also its presence in some places that may seem surprising.

Three hundred years ago, no one had any clue that gigantic
creatures once stomped around the Earth's surface. Then, a little girl
in Scotland called to her dad's attention a fragment of quite a large
bone, too big to belong to any animal known at the time.
Eventually, the Enlightenment scientists surmised that the bone in
fact must have belonged to a long-extinct, reptile-like creature,
terrifyingly huge. Once their eyes knew what to look for, the
scientists began to find dinosaur bones practically everywhere they
looked.

Once you have an idea of what to look for, you start finding it.

What is a Mystical Experience?

Whatever we say here will misrepresent and vastly oversimplify -
or overcomplexify - what the mystics tell us about their
experiences. The misrepresentation is unavoidable, though, because
of the limitations of language, which virtually all mystics warn of.
Still, language is our only reliable means of sorting things out and
trying to communicate what we find.*

The word "mysticism" implies so many different meanings and
levels of experience that it's almost impossible to define accurately.
It can refer, depnding on the context it's used in, to everything from
astrology, telepathy, UFO sightings, reincarnation and ancestor
worship, to the belief that dreams have meanings, the visions of
saints, shamans and religious masters, and belief or witness of the
incarnation of God. In this essay's sense, "mysticism" refers to the
peak experience commonly referred to by the phrase "mystical
union."

"Mystical union," the Encyclopedia of Religion says, "is the
unmediated, transforming experience of the unification of man or
man's soul with the highest reality" (Encyclopedia of Religion 239).
More simply put, the classic mystical experience is a powerful,
sudden sense of unification with the universe. The mystics indicate
that during the experience, there is no sense of separation from
anything; the mystic him or herself has fused with, or is everything.
The experience is not an experience of knowing something, not an
acquisition of knowledge, since for knowledge to exist, there have
to be at least two entities - the thing or person that knows (referred
to in philosophy as the "subject") and the thing that is known
(referred to as the "object"). For this reason, mystical union is not a
form of knowledge: Where two things are distinguishable, there is
no unity. Instead, it is an experience: The mystics speak
unequivocally of the experienced reality of unity, not an observation
or abstract understanding of it. After the experience, for lack of
more direct means, they communicate it as though it's a kind of
knowledge, but the mystics themselves point out that language
misrepresents the experience of union with the "Absolute."

William James's Four Qualities of Mystical Experience

William James in his lectures which became the influential book
The Varieties of Religious Experience, made one of the early
significant modern descriptions of mystical experience. James used
the phrase "mystical state of consciousness" in order to make a
distinction between mystical experience itself and conventional
religious interpretations of people's experience of God. One of his