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.
[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.
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