S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 4 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 8 1 9 Mike Sosteric 3 What is Mystical Experience? Once we accept the validity of mystical experience, then we need to be careful not to pathologize it. Although there are some cases where mystical experience intersects with madness (Heriot-Maitland 2008), in most cases mystical experiences have positive effects on the mental health of the people who have them (Newberg, d’Aquile, and Rause 2001). Indeed, Abraham Maslow said that the healthiest people have mystical experiences (Maslow 1962). If you accept that mystical experience is valid and a lot of people have them, and if you can avoid pathologizing it long enough to take a closer look, the next question becomes, what is a mystical experience. Unfortunately, that is not an easy question to answer, not because the answer is particularly difficult to come up with, but because we, and by “we” I mean the scholars who study mystical experience, often get stuck trying to answer it. We get stuck for a few reasons, I think. Reason one: Mystical experience is big. The first reason we get stuck trying to understand and explain it is that it is big…, really big…, so big in fact that the people who have them often exclaim they are “ineffable” and “beyond words” (Stace 1960a, b). Mystical experiences are often, though now always, filled with grand cosmic revelations, glorious divine enlightenments, and the recognition of vast and powerful cosmic intelligence, as Einstein put it (Hermanns 1983), far beyond “normal” human consciousness. It’s like an LSD trip when your brain is still underdeveloped. The psychedelics of it “blow your mind”, at least temporarily, and make it difficult to find words. The size of these experiences is a problem. It is a problem for the people who have them because it makes it difficult to integrate and ground their “cosmic experiences”, as Einstein would say. It is also a problem for some scholars because from the subject’s expression of ineffability, some scholars conclude ineffability, and leave it at that, not trying. Happy to poke around at the periphery of the phenomenon, they leave it at that. “We’ll never understand it,” they’ll say, “because it is above human language, and impossible to understand.” Reason two: No common language. Of course, not everybody gets stuck on the cosmic bigness of the mystical experiences, or cops out trying to figure it out. Some do try to explain it, but that can be a problem as well because those who do try to explain it contribute to what I want to call lexical confusion. Lots of people have come up with lots of different words to describe the whole thing, but all these words get poured into an intra-cultural word soup that does more to obscure than enlighten. Western mystics talk about the experiences of gnosis (Inge 2005, 9) [1], oneness, connectionwith the incorruptible one (Wisse 1990, 105), or the descent of Christ consciousness. Hindus call it Sam̄adhi (Zimmer 1951), Sat-Chit-Ananda, or experiencing the boundless bliss of Brahman. Sufis sayFana (Vaughan-Lee 1998) and Buddhists say Satori (Smith 1958). In the TibetanBook of the Dead, we connect to the Clear Light (Evans-Wents 1960). Evangelical Christians speak of being “born again” into the Light or experiencing the Living Flame of Love (John of the Cross 2015) or the Love-Fire (Böhme 1912). And it is not just the extremely faithful that speak of it. Even those few scientists who have looked at it have come up with their own language, calling them peak experiences, “pure consciousness events”, cosmic religious feeling, and so on. It is a bloody Babylonian tower of bewildering biblical proportions, that is for sure. With no consistent and agreed upon language or framework, defining mystical experience clearly, discussing it sensibly, and understanding it even a little, is a challenge. Reason three: Confusion and obfuscation. Lexical and phenomenological obstacles are not the only reasons we get stuck trying to explain mystical experience. Another problem comes from the fact that some hide their teachings and understandings to confuse and obscure. This sounds conspiratorial, but not really. What I am talking about here are the political and social class dynamics of human spirituality. Just like all things, there are complex social class, political, and even gender interests figure into human spirituality. There is evidence of members of certain social classes inferring with and obfuscating human spirituality throughout human history. Consider for example the western Tarot deck. This tarot deck, which some take to be a fountain of esoteric spiritual wisdom, is a remarkable piece of spiritual/political propaganda, so remarkable in fact that the foremost and most respected historical scholars of the tarot called it the …most successful propaganda campaign ever launched: not by a very long way the most important, but the most completely successful. An entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed (Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett 1996, 27). Essentially freemasons developed this deck at a time when they needed to shift spiritual thinking in a direction away from support of feudal elites, and towards support and development of capitalist agenda (Sosteric 2014). They used the
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