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 2 1 Mike Sosteric gender and social class distortions that, sometimes intentionally, often unintentionally, obfuscate authentic human spirituality, you still get stuck trying to explain it to the “uninitiated”. By uninitiated, I mean someone who has never, or as Maslow points out, more likely doesn’t remember having/ is repressing, a mystical experience. Trying to explain to, and have a conversion with, someone who has never had a mystical experience is like trying to explain what you see with your eyes, to somebody who doesn’t have eyes to see. I’m not saying anything new. We’re all familiar with the parable of the elephant. Trying to explain mystical experience to the uninitiated is like trying to explain an elephant to a group of blindfolded men who never get to see it, and can only understand by feeling it up. Combine language difficulties with the size of it, intentional obfuscation, and problems communicating to the uninitiated, and you can understand why defining, understanding, and explaining mystical experience is a major challenge. I try to capture the challenge of it in myAllegory of the Blindfold (Sosteric 2017a), but I’m not the first one to point out the challenges, either directly or through allegory and metaphor. Indeed, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a classic attempt to explain the problems associated with understanding and talking about mystical experiences to those still facing the lights on the wall. 4 Mystical Experience is Connection With all the problems associated with mystical experience, is it possible to understand, define, and discuss? I believe it is, though I will say, it takes a lot of work to wrap your head around it, even when you are a longtime “explorer of the realms” as I am. I think the best way to at least start talking about the experience is to understand mystical experiences, religious experiences, as, at root, connection experiences (Sosteric 2017b). From the mystical “connection” flows the various forms of connection experience, like religious experience, mystical experience, Fana, connection to the “pure light”, and so on, with individual variation in intensity and depth being explained by psychological, sociological, and even neurological variables, like the religious or political lens through which the experience flows, any pathologies that may be present, damage to the brain systems, and so on. Moving forward, based on research and my own connection experiences, I would like to define mystical experience simply as connection to something more than the Normal Consciousness of our daily existence. What is this more? Lukoff suggests the “more” is the divine. According to Lukoff, mystical experience is a harmonious relationship (i.e. connection) to the divine. Similarly, Phillips (2001, 494) suggests that a mystical experience is “direct awareness of… a ‘Spiritual Object’ [such] as Brahman”, in other words, a connection to divinity. When somebody has a mystical experience, they are having an experience characterized by connection to the divine, or some aspect of it. That is, they are connected to something more than their normal, egoic consciousness. This definition accurately represents the general phenomenology of the mystical experience. I think if you ask anybody who has had mystical experiences, religious experience, peak experiences, etc., every single one would agree; they’ve connected to “something more than the normal identity of their normal daily life”. Of course, not everybody agrees that there is anything divine about mystical experience. Some will tell you that the mystical experience has neurological roots. They will say that mystical experience occurs when neurological things happen in the brain (Newberg, d’Aquile, and Rause 2001; Newberg and Waldman 2009; Heriot-Maitland 2008). By making this claim, they reduce the “more” of mystical experience to neurological activity. Others (Dossey 2012), myself included, would say that “the more” is not neurological (though there may be neurological correlates), but in fact “more” than even that. As already noted, as Lukoff and Phillips suggest, the “more” is something divine. I prefer to put aside notions of divinity and adopt a more secular language. I would theorize that “the more” we connect to is the Fabric of Consciousness (Sosteric 2016) as it exists sui generis, and independently of the physical universe. You can call that Fabric God, G-D, Ain, Ain Soph, Para Brahman, the All, the Living Flame, the Clear Light, Cosmic Intelligence, or whatever you want. I simply call it “The Fabric of Consciousness”. It is to this “Fabric” that, if you can believe Abraham Maslow, we all connect to, with more or less intensity, with more or less duration, with more or less frequency, and with more or less open acknowledge, when we have a mystical experience. 5 Conclusion So, everybody has a connection experience. Everybody connects, at one time or another, to something more. Whether you think the “something more” is merely a disaggregated or innervated neural network, or something that exists independently of the body, is neither here nor there. I believe it is more than simple neural activity, but until scientists can all see for themselves how consciousness can interface with physical matter without physical intervention (a “quantum”
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