Reading Mystical Literature

motives in making the distinction was to try to understand mystical
experience in a more scientific way, using the new science of
psychology in place of the approaches of traditional religions. Thus
he spoke of a visionary or mystical experience as a state of
consciousness instead of, for example, an encounter with Christ,
Muhammad or Buddha. James said that the reports of mystical
experience that he studied had four qualities in common:
ineffability; noetic quality; transiency; and passivity.

By "ineffability," James meant that the mystics claim their
experience cannot be described or conveyed in words, and this
implied to him that mystical experience is a state of feeling rather
than a state of the intellect. Being emotional - and deeper - rather
than intellectual, it cannot be spoken of directly or accurately the
way an idea can.

Further, a mystical state of consciousness has a "noetic quality"
which is a state of knowledge or insight into truths that the rational
intellect cannot grasp. It is a state, rather than objective knowing.

Third, "transiency" refers to the fact that mystical states do not last
long in time, usually only a few minutes or, at most, hours.

And finally by "passivity," James meant that the mystical state of
consciousness, while it might be prepared for, is not induced at will
and "the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance" (James
343).

W.T. Stace and the Visions of Unity

James created these categories in the latter part of the 1800s when
psychology as a branch of science was just gaining its footing. They
are still widely referred to today in discussions of mystical
experience, but they have been revised by many writers. When we
discuss, for example, some Middle Eastern, Chinese and Native
American mystics in the terms of Evelyn Underhill's categories,
James's idea of transiency will be reworked to some extent.

In the mid-twentieth century, W.T. Stace observed that a critical
element of mystical experience is absent from James's outline: the
experience of union. In his book Mysticism and Philosophy Stace
created a set of categories which, while they have been debated, still
help describe and identify the mystical experience. Stace said there
are two basic kinds of the peak mystical experience: introvertive
and extrovertive.

The introvertive experience is marked by the "Unitary
Consciousness," in which all sensory experience drops away and (in
Stace's words) "there remains only a void and empty unity" (110).
The introvertive experience is neither objective nor subjective, in
the sense that it is a total fusion of consciousness in which all
experience, as we understand it, is absent. It is sometimes described
as union with God, or with the total, undifferentiated cosmic
consciousness. The personal self, or what since Freud has been
referred to as the ego, disappears completely in the introvertive
mystical experience, and exists in a state of pure consciousness,
without space or time.

The extrovertive experience is characterized by a Unifying Vision
of reality, in which the mystic not only knows but fully experiences
the sense that all things are one. "The One is … perceived through
the physical senses, in or through the multiplicity of objects" (Stace
79). The Unifying Vision differs from the Unitary Consciousness in
the fact that the experiencer maintains a sense of his or her personal
self and surroundings; but it's similar in the fact that no separation
or distinction from anything in the universe is sensed. Everything
seen, heard or otherwise experienced during this intense moment is
experienced as one's own self as a "concrete apprehension of the One
as an inner subjectivity, or life, in all things" (Stace 131).

It might be possible to say, by way of metaphor, that the
introvertive experience implodes the self, to a sort of annihilation,
while the extrovertive experience explodes the self into all. This
metaphor should be taken for what it's worth, however, coming
thirdhand as it were.

Within the two main kinds of experience, Stace outlines several
other characteristics that tend to appear in descriptions of mystical
experience, with the note that these characteristics are frequent but
not universal. His list follows in his words:

· Sense of objectivity or reality
· Blessedness, peace, etc.
· Feeling of the holy, sacred, or divine
· Paradoxicality
· Alleged by mystics to be ineffable

A way of reading mystical literature is to watch for depictions of
Stace's "Unifying Vision," "Unitary Consciousness," and these other
indications of mystical sensibility in poems, stories and other
writings.

Needless to say, Stace's outline is not universally accurate. We
might think of it as a sort of viable approximation, like Ptolemy's
Earth-centered model of the universe which he refined in the first
century A.D. It was accurate enough to stay in use for about 1,500
years, but despite its viability it was, after all, wrong - the Earth and
other planets travel around the Sun, as far as we know now. Stace in
a way is working at the same distance from his material as Ptolemy
worked from his. Both have a certain amount of information to
work with, but in both cases the information is limited. Stace's is
limited to the reports of the mystics, which the mystics themselves
say is unreliable because the experience of unification is "ineffable"
- it is not describable or conveyable in words.

Philosophic critics have attacked Stace's categories, mainly on the
grounds that its internal logic breaks down when generalizing about
the mystical traditions of diverse cultures. In the Buddhist tradition,
for example, the mystical experience is frequently described as an
emptiness, while in Western religious traditions it is often
described as a fullness; emptiness and fullness cannot logically be
the same thing, and so Buddhists obviously have a qualitatively
different experience than do many Western mystics. So goes the
logic.

But along with the problems of emptiness and fullness, unity and
multiplicity, ineffability and depiction, is also the problem of
paradox, as Stace's list indicates. Stace's critics by and large do not
deal with the fact that contradictory facts and assertions flow freely
in descriptions of mystical experience. For example, if the mystical
experience cannot be spoken of, why do mystics speak of it?

No metaphor can say this,
But I can't stop pointing
To the beauty

Rumi explains, in the version by Coleman Barks (Rumi 129). This
is a way of saying that Stace's imperfect categories can nonetheless
serve as guides in the strange wilderness of mystical writing, the
way Ptolemy's imperfect cosmology served as a guide to the strange
wilderness of the sky.

W.H. Auden's Four Kinds of Mystical Experience

Stace's categories for the most part hold up. Naturally, a great many
others besides Stace have said a great deal about mystical writing
and experience, and to help add some dimension to Stace's
guidelines, Professor Clements notes the categories created by W.H.
Auden, and the biographical categories explained by Evelyn
Underhill.

Auden proposes four categories of mystical experience, or four
kinds of "vision": the Vision of God; the Vision of Eros; the Vision
of Agape, or brotherhood; and the Vision of Dame Kind, or nature.
The Vision of God corresponds essentially to Stace's description of
the introvertive mystical experience. Dante has the Vision of God at
the climax of the Paradiso; Rumi in his mystical poetry; and Plato
describes it in the Allegory of the Cave.

The extrovertive experience can occur as the Vision of Eros, of
Agape, or of Dame Kind. The Vision of Eros is an experience of