Among the Mystics

I have a shelf of authors such as John of the Cross, both St. Theresas, Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Catherine of Siena and so on. We call these people mystics and on the whole their books are not laden with complex semantics and jargon or dense, close reasoning. That said I find them the slowest form of reading there is and after 20 pages of John of the Cross one despairs to see that there are hundreds more. This is because every such writer struggles with the same fundamental problem: how to speak of things too simple and ineffable to put in words. Every such work is almost by definition a failure. One senses that those able to understand them do not need them and those who need them will never understand them. This, though, is a counsel of despair. We may move by the light of analogy when other lights fail and on such a principle I find these works the most crucial and crucially human that I possess.

I say this even though the weight of mystical experiences may well take a toll on ordinary psychology or even physical health. Mysticism is, of necessity, near aligned to madness and is only truly known in its fruits. This is true of its most archaic forms such as Shamanism. The Shaman (in many cultures) comes to awareness of herself and her role and destiny through a period of sickness and struggle both mental and physical. If a Shaman results from this process it is because the person has integrated very refractory and difficult experiences into a functioning personality. To that extent mystical practices and traditions perform a therapeutic role that our society very clearly and very desperately lacks. We have no social role for people with a-typical mental lives and that, very clearly, is a disaster for industrial societies though a boon for the pharmaceutical industry. 

Mystical experiences, then, are the most importantly humanizing ones however counter-intuitive this may seem. This is because the consciousness of mystic has seen past fundamental illusions that actually bedevil ordinary human existence. In that sense, I take their simple, direct claims to experienced ‘another world’ to be entirely factual and neither fabricated nor insane. Not only atheists and agnostics will demur at this but many Christians as well and indeed even the Catholic Church, the only one in the west to recognize in an official way the teaching of mystics, has put any number of them to death. We of course do not go this far because we have found other ways to dismiss and marginalize unusual states of consciousness besides killing the people who experience them. We use social ostracism and psychological cruelty where our ancestors used torture and execution which is progress of a sort I guess. At any rate this adds to the difficulty of reading mystical texts for they must not only find words for things for which there are no words they must also parse them in such a fashion as not to end up in jail or worse.

I suppose then I have my work cut out for me if I am to explain why mystics (and not just Christian ones but Jewish, Islamic, Far Eastern and Classical too)[1] are my essential guide to life even though I am not gifted with their visions and locutions and my consciousness is as banal and discursive as can be. However, I mentioned analogy above and what I mean by that is that mystical states are partly accessible to us as extensions of basic human consciousness. Indeed they tell us what is possible for human consciousness rather as travelers tell us about foreign places and as there is no particular reason to dismiss the latter, so there is no reason to dismiss the former. At any rate the main thing they tell us is that of our human potential for love we activate barely a fraction. Natural egotism of the individual or group, the level on which most of us remain most of the time, simply does not require it and in strictly naturalist terms we have no need whatsoever for the expanded capacities of mystics. We might then legitimately wonder why we have capacities of this sort if our entire end were natural existence as, say, biology currently understands it. Of course, that is just what the mystic experiences. The mystic energizes love beyond the boundaries of natural consciousness and the empirical world and finds in that state a total activation and realization of the self. What is more this self- actualization touches the divine: love energized fully in the human experiences love as the absolute and unconditional principle behind the veil of external reality. What the mystics experience in its blinding fullness we too experience in hints and guess and, to use a phrase from Wordsworth, spots of time. Their consciousness is an extension and intensification of ours at its best and that is why they are important for us even if we cannot follow such a path ourselves. That it is possible, at least for some, to energize love beyond space and time is, if nothing else, a significant consolation and a significant clue for the rest of us.                         

        

                 

                                                           

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[1] I assume no bland unity between these traditions but simply point out that mystical consciousness has been realized analogously in different cultural contexts. If you are interested in what the ‘one true religion’ is in an exclusionary sense the mystics will not help you for they exist across confessions. If you are a Christian, though, I would tell you that Christian mystics will deepen your Christianity many-fold and I would say the same thing to Muslims about Rumi or Al-Hallaj. I make the same recommendation to poets for between the upper end of poetic inspiration and the lower end of mysticism is only a hair’s breadth.