Mysticism in detail

 

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Mysticism and secrecy

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Also known as: mystical theology

Written by

Dan Merkur

Psychoanalyst and Research Reader in the Department of the Study of Religion, Universtiy of Toronto. Author of The Psychedelic Sacrament: Manna, Meditation, and Mystical Experience and Mystical...

Dan Merkur

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Experiencing the hidden

Because mystics experience spiritual phenomena that are hidden from the senses, the physical world disclosed by sense perception does not exhaust reality as mystics understand it. Some mystics find the spiritual to be immanent within the world of ordinary sense perception, but others discount the perceptible world as illusion and attribute reality to the spiritual alone. Whatever the precise detail of the relation of the extrasensory to the perceptible, the hiddenness of the spiritual is an important characteristic of mysticism.

Many mystics claim that their experiences are indescribable in human language. Language can refer to experiences, as a kind of notational shorthand that enables other people who have had similar experiences to understand approximately what is meant, but it can never convey the whole content of an experience.

Not only do mystics feel that they have experienced a hidden dimension of reality, they generally seek to conform with it. For Confucians, conformance with the Dao traditionally consisted of implementing it in the administration of government. For Western rational mystics, conformance with nous took the form of pursuing philosophical knowledge and, in some cases, its technological implementation, as in medicine or alchemy. For most of the world’s mystics, however, conformance with reality’s hidden dimension is achieved through its imitation. Many Hindu Yogis, Buddhist meditators, and Christian mystics have attempted, so far as possible, to be exclusively spiritual, abstaining from material possessions and the satisfaction of bodily needs and withdrawing from human society and the entire world of physical existence. Other approaches, however, are less extreme.

Claims of indescribability differ from claims of inexplicable paradox. Unitive experiences frequently inspire mystics to assert a paradox, such as the claim that all is one, that being is nothingness, or that masculinity and femininity are the same thing. The analytic psychologist Carl Jung suggested the term mysterium coniunctionis (Latin: “mystery of the conjunction”) as a designation for mystical paradoxes. Mystics who conceptualize a mysterium coniunctionis—and not all do so—find it difficult to express the paradox in words, both in their own thoughts and in interpersonal communications. Words permit one to arrive at the paradox. For example, the statement “A and B are one” uses the nonparadoxical concepts “A,” “B,” and “one.” Each of the nonparadoxical concepts can be explained separately. However, the concepts are juxtaposed in such a way that the sentence as a whole arrives at a concept of “one” that is not its customary meaning, and it can be extremely difficult to find words that express the paradox at greater length by articulating nuances, implications, corollaries, and so forth.

The practice of secrecy

Because mystics experience spiritual phenomena that are hidden from the senses, they often conform with the secrecy of the spiritual by being secretive themselves. Some mystics retreat into silence. Some preserve secrecy about their ecstatic experiences but speak openly about their mystical ideas and beliefs. Others are still less secretive, withholding, for example, only a certain technique by which alternate states of consciousness are attained, such as a doctrine, a chant, or a spiritual name. In many Native American cultures, people were expected to seek visions in order to encounter a guardian spirit who would bestow a song or name by which a lesser spirit could be acquired as a helper. The song or name was kept secret, so that no one else would have access to the power it conferred, and in most cases the contents of the vision were reported only to the person who taught the visionary. In this manner the hiddenness of the spiritual was imitated by the visionaries and their communities. In several traditional African cultures, boys approaching puberty were taken from their villages into the forest, where they lived in a boys’ village for as long as two or three years. During this period, they were taught secret lore and underwent the ritual induction of a mystical experience through the administration of a psychoactive drug. Following initiation, the youths returned to the communal villages and outwardly carried on as though no secrets existed.

In many other cultures, people undergo initiation into secret societies through mystical practice. In other cases, initiation into a mystical practice defines a social class. For example, a successful vision quest was a condition of male eligibility to join a hunting party in many Native American cultures. Elsewhere, initiations were key to participation in warriors’ groups and militias and in occasional trades, such as iron smithing. In Classical Greece and the Hellenistic world, rites of initiation were undergone for the sake of having mystical experiences and gaining knowledge of the mysteries. Secret societies, often with political agendas, have been a major feature of Daoism for nearly 2,000 years and have been characteristic of Western esotericism since the Renaissance.

Mystics in many cultural traditions maintain secrets by speaking and writing in coded languages that are not understood by the laity of the tradition. Shamans convey secret meanings to each other by using vocabularies that consist of archaic words and metaphors. Daoism similarly utilizes coded language, a fact that makes extensive parts of Daoist texts incomprehensible to noninitiates. The “intentional languages” of Hindu and Buddhist Tantric texts include vocabularies in the names of commonplace items that are intentionally used in secret ways to speak about visionary and mystical experiences. In his Seventh Letter, Plato asserted that his writings contain hints at secret teachings; and the Babylonian Talmud, a compilation of Jewish teachings and commentaries, instructs that Jewish mysticism is to be taught by means of “chapter headings” alone. The symbolae (“symbols”) of the Pythagoreans, the ciphers of Western alchemists, the taʾwil (allegorical interpretations) of Sufi mystics, and the Kabbalists’ exegetical technique of sod (“secret”) are further developments of the practice of coded languages among Western mystics.

Secrecy may also have ethical consequences. In Hinduism, Buddhism, and the early-Christian gnostic movement, mystical secrecy includes the devaluing of phenomenological reality as “unreal.” The divine is seen as a keeper of secrets, who deceives and makes sport of humanity, condemning it to suffering through ignorance. In other mystical systems, perceptible reality is regarded not as a deception but as a code that a mystic may learn. Syrian Christian mysticism regards physical phenomena as symbols of higher spiritual realities. The Neoplatonic tradition, which undergirds Sufism, the Kabbala, and Western esotericism, regards physical phenomena as lower manifestations of realities that are spiritual at higher levels of being. In the 16th century the Dutch mystic Jakob Böhme wrote of “the signature of all things.” The correspondence of the cosmos with the human body in both Daoism and Tantric mysticism permits both orders of reality to be coded in terms of the gods, the landscape, the elements, various mineral and vegetable substances, and so forth.

Mystical states

Trance

Mystical experiences can be categorized not only according to their contents but also according to the alternate states of consciousness during which they occur. For example, St. Teresa of Ávila distinguished four stages of mystical prayer. In “the prayer of simplicity,” a prayer that is roughly one sentence in length is repeated continuously until other thoughts cease to follow in an orderly succession. As thought is gradually halted, the prayer reaches a point termed the “ligature” or “suspension,” when external reality is significantly less distracting. The second stage of prayer, “the prayer of the quiet,” begins at the onset of the ligature. During this stage, repetitive prayer continues to require conscious effort, but it gradually ceases to be a voluntary meditation and instead becomes an involuntary passively experienced object of contemplation. When the increasing oblivion to external reality and the preoccupation with contemplation reach such an extent that distractions entirely cease to intrude on consciousness, the prayer of quiet has ended and “the prayer of the full mystical union” is said to have commenced. Efforts to avoid distraction and maintain contemplation are now all but unnecessary. Sense perception is half-suspended; the sense of hearing is the last of the senses to be inhibited. The simultaneous increase of the ligature and contemplation is again progressive, arriving by increments at the final stage of Roman Catholic mystical experience, which St. Teresa described in terms of three categories. “Ecstasy” appears gradually or quietly. “Rapture” is an experience of the same content when its onset is violent and sudden. Lastly, the “flight of the soul” is a rapture with the specific content of an out-of-body experience.

The four stages of mystical prayer may be described psychologically as four gradually deeper stages of trance, a psychic state in which thinking about something accomplishes what an effort of will is ordinarily necessary to effect. As trance deepens, the ordinary functions of consciousness are lost one by one, with gradually increasing intensity or extent. Because the functions of ordinary consciousness are inhibited, the contents of trance experiences are received without conflict, regardless of whether they would be disturbing during normal waking sobriety. Similarly, it is no more possible during trance than during the dreams of natural sleep to recognize fantasies as fantasies. Whatever their contents, mystical trances may be experienced as real and true. Ideas become delusions; daydreams become hallucinations. Trances consequently promote forms of religiosity that are at least partly inconsistent with a scientific understanding of the perceptible world.

Reverie

Not all mysticism has its basis in trance states, however. Rudolf Otto noted this fact when he proposed a dualistic classification of numinous experiences. In the mysterium tremendum (“awe inspiring mystery”), the numinous is experienced as mysterious, awesome, and urgent. Otto identified the other class of experiences, in which the numinous is fascinans (“fascinating”), with the “Dionysian element,” as defined by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This allusion to the chaotic, creative, spontaneous, and irrepressible element of the unconscious implied that the mysterium tremendum was the Apollonian element—orderly, controlling, rationalistic, and conscious.

In reverie states, numinous experiences occur without the inhibition of consciousness, and visions are experienced as revelations rather than as perceptions of externally existing realities. The contents of the visions are often symbolic or allegorical and require proper interpretation in order to be understood. Unitive experiences too are thought to be metaphors and not literal truths.

Many contents of mystical experience may occur in both trances and reveries and may differ in little more than the reification and preternaturalism that trance contributes. The experience that all is one, for example, may lead in trance to a denial of the reality of physical plurality, while in reverie it may lead to wonderment at something like the periodic table of atomic elements, which attests to a unity that underlies physical reality. In trance, the all-in-one is reified, so that plurality cannot be real; in reverie, the all-in-one is self-evidently a metaphor and speaks to an extrasensory dimension of the physical. The idea of dying may be manifested during a reverie as an experience of “mystical death,” a rare instance when reverie has the quality of a mysterium tremendum. Vivid hallucinatory fantasies of being about to die, in the process of dying, or having died can cause extreme panic, which ends with the realization that life continues. During a trance, the idea of dying may take visionary form as an out-of-body experience in which the visionary survives the body by leaving it. Reverie and trance accommodate other disturbing materials in similar ways, with disturbance being experienced in reverie and inhibited or wished away in trance. Mystics can interpret reverie states as though they were trance states, resulting in an attitude toward visions that the French historian of religions Henry Corbin termed “imaginal.” Mystics can also interpret trance states as though they were reveries.

Techniques for inducing mystical experiences

According to surveys, roughly one-third of the population of both the United States and the United Kingdom has had one or more spontaneous mystical experiences; almost all of these were reveries. A tiny fraction of the population has had mystical experiences caused by psychopathology; these experiences are invariably reified.

Mystical experiences can also be induced voluntarily. Trance states can be brought about by many forms of concentrative meditation that fix attention monotonously, such as mantras, Buddhist samadhi (Sanskrit: “total self-collectedness”), Sufi dhikr (Arabic: “reminding oneself”), the Eastern Orthodox Jesus prayer (a mental invocation of the name of Jesus Christ), and staring at a crystal, a burning flame, or a drop of oil. Mystical use has also been made of trances that were produced by psychoactive drugs, such as those contained in the fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria) and the African shrub Tabernanthe iboga and in potions made from the mandrake, henbane, belladonna, and datura plants.

Reveries can also be induced voluntarily. During waking consciousness, visualizing and dwelling emotionally on a mental image can induce a reverie in which a vision may occur. Mystical use has also been made of hypnagogic states, which immediately precede sleep. Sensory deprivation has been cultivated in the depths of caves and also in pits, huts, windowless rooms in temples, and other constructions that reduce sensory stimuli. In the Kabbala and the Ars magna (“The Great Art”) of the Catalan mystic and poet Ramon Llull, alphabetic letters were combined in pairs in alphabetic order. Inuit shamans rubbed a small stone in a circle on a larger one. Both procedures were regarded as magical, but both dependably produced reverie states.

John WesleyJohn Wesley, detail of an oil painting by Nathaniel Hone, 1766; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The Buddhist meditative practice of satipatthana (Sanskrit: “mindfulness”) or vipassana (“insight”), which aims to arrest the process of thought, induces a reverie state of mystical intensity that Buddhists consider a pseudo-nirvana. A Christian mystical technique, which John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, called “watching,” involves observation of the contents of consciousness in order to detach oneself emotionally from sinful ideas. Wesley paired this technique with another, known as “the practice of the Presence of God,” which also induces a state of reverie. The hitbonenut (Hebrew: “self-reflection”) meditation of Moses Maimonides also induced a reverie state.

Mystical experiences in reverie states have been occasioned by the use of hallucinatory or psychedelic substances or drugs, such as ergot, LSD, peyote, San Pedro cactus, psilocybin-bearing mushrooms, and marijuana. Peyote is used sacramentally in the Native American Church and other legally authorized institutions. San Pedro cactus is used sacramentally in some South American shamanistic traditions. Some scholars have hypothesized that the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece employed ergot sacramentally; others have asserted that manna, the miraculous bread of the Bible, was described as psychoactive in the biblical text and was secretly so understood by many commentators through the centuries. Although psychedelic drugs do not themselves produce mystical experiences, they create alternate states of consciousness that may lead to mystical experiences through prayer, meditation, visualization, or other religious activity. The “Good Friday Experiment,” in which Walter Pahnke, a researcher at Harvard University, administered psilocybin in a double-blind study in 1962, established that when both mental “set” (the total contents of the mind) and physical “setting” are arranged to encourage the occurrence of a mystical experience, it occurs with a 90 percent probability. (Pahnke made the concept of a mystical experience operational by defining it in terms of characteristic experiential features, as reported by celebrated mystics from all the world’s religions.) Claims that psychedelic mysticism differs from traditional mysticism invariably point to factors by which reverie states differ from trance states and not to characteristics that distinguish psychedelic mysticism from reverie-based mysticism.

Set and setting influence the contents of all mystical techniques. Requiring would-be mystics to practice austerities and to meditate for several years before they attain a mystical experience motivates them to have highly disciplined, doctrinally orthodox experiences. Providing easy access to mystical experiences necessitates greater doctrinal tolerance of varied experiences. The American psychologist and philosopher William James introduced the term “overbeliefs” to explain the contents of mystical experiences that reflect doctrinal expectations rather than the immediate or spontaneous features of the experiences themselves. Many auxiliary practices serve as overbeliefs: ethical behaviour, doctrinal preparation, asceticism, gymnastics, isolation, diet, drumming, dance, and rituals. Another category of overbelief is a mystic’s emotional attachment to his teacher.

The goal of mysticism

What mystics hope to achieve differs from culture to culture. Shamans, theurgists, Daoists, Kabbalists, Western esotericians, and many others are primarily interested in mystical experiences as a means of performing magic. The gnostics of late antiquity, Hindu mystics, and Buddhists have sought liberation from ignorance through the apprehension of truth, and Christian and Sufi mystics seek consolation in God.

For the most part, mystics are engaged in acquiring a set of skills that will enable them to have visions, unitive experiences, possession states, and so forth. In a few cases, however, the purpose of mystical practice is to produce personal transformation. Confucianism, for example, is aimed at the cultivation of sagehood. Fourteenth-century Roman Catholic meditations on the Passion of Christ, which induced death-and-resurrection experiences that were considered mystical unions with Jesus, were consciously aimed at reforming the soul in both faith and feeling. Early English Methodism was aimed at the achievement of a state of “sanctification,” in which sin ceases to be tempting and virtue is effortless. Tibetan Buddhism is directed toward the production of enlightened individuals, called bodhisattvas, who inevitably acquire compassion as a side effect of their progress toward truthful understanding.

Modern psychological research has established that both Buddhist “insight” meditation and Jesuit spirituality, the latter based on the teachings of St. Ignatius of Loyola, promote healthy growth of the personality. Other researchers, however, have argued that mystical practices can be used as a form of brainwashing that promotes cult behaviour. Brainwashing typically involves a blend of attraction and coercion that subverts a person’s sense of integrity and inculcates a new set of values. Positive techniques such as support from the in-group coincide with negative techniques such as shaming, guilt-making, physical abuse, and isolation from friends, family, and other outsiders. In such a context, the euphoria of mystical experience may enhance the attractiveness of a cult. It is not the positive techniques, however, but only the negative ones that reach traumatizing intensity, accomplishing coercion rather than persuasion. In all, mysticism may be regarded as an emotionally intense experience, in which the personality is unusually plastic. Change for both the good and bad is possible to a greater than usual extent.

In 1966 David Bakan, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, argued that Sigmund Freud’s practice of psychoanalysis—and, by extension, all of the psychotherapies derived from it—constitute a modern revival of rational mysticism. Bakan contended that free association is a type of meditation that is intended to induce moments of inspiration that psychoanalysts call “insight.” Psychoanalytic insights not only provide intuitive access to truths that are not manifest but also disclose a unity that underlies the apparent disconnectedness or nonintegration of manifest thought. Whereas the Aristotelian mystics of antiquity and the Middle Ages meditated on nature outside themselves, Freudian clients meditate on their own natures, arriving at results that are no less mystical. In keeping with Bakan’s intuition, several initiatives have sought to coordinate traditional religious mysticism with contemporary psychotherapy. For example, transpersonal psychology, which developed from humanistic psychology in the 1970s, proceeds from the assumption that, because some mystics have demonstrably enjoyed superlative mental health, selected uses of classical mystical techniques may facilitate the therapeutic goal of self-actualization. Westerners who engage in Buddhist forms of meditation have frequently attempted to use them as a kind of self-therapy, leading meditators who are qualified psychotherapists to place programs of meditation on a professionally responsible foundation. Within Freudian psychoanalysis, a very small number of practitioners have recognized both free association and the analyst’s practice of “analytic listening” as types of meditation and have attempted to articulate further the mystical character of psychoanalysis. At the same time, many of the world’s religions are becoming massively psychologized. Religious counseling and pastoral work are everywhere becoming increasingly sophisticated in both psychotherapeutic competence and psychological understanding. If deep psychotherapy is indeed a rational form of mysticism, then a new era in mysticism worldwide could be at hand.