Lot has been said about mystic experiences. But nothing can be said about it. You can look at mystical experience from a phenomenological perspective and describe the circumstances and the phenomena of mystic perception, but the mystic experience is as such indescribable.
How to kill your Idols
“We no longer value ourselves sufficiently highly when we communicate our soul’s content. Our real experiences are not at all garrulous. [..] Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome. In all speech there lies an element of contempt. Speech, it would seem, was only invented for average, mediocre and communicable things. — Every spoken word proclaims the speaker vulgarized — (Extract from a moral code for deaf-and-dumb people and other philosophers.)” Nietzsche: The Twilight of the Idols
Reason and Mind
Mystical experience is not to be confused with insight into reasonable concepts our mind is capable to come up with.
There is an interesting aspect about the functioning of the mind: It does operate on different levels. The level of pure reason, as Kant is naming it, is the level of abstract concepts. On this level, the mind operates with abstract “principles of pure reason” (Kant). Familiar terms like “god”, “the absolute”, “the nothingness” etc. are examples for such “principles of pure reason”. But as they are terms of the mind, and the mind only – and Kant is really accurate here – such concepts just fulfill an operational role to determinate the empirical knowledge with their totality of condition. As such, Kant writes, they are transcendent and can never be part of experience, because their meaning is: continuity – and this is solely an idea of reason.
Idols, wtf?
To make it a little more relatable (but keep in mind it is not exactly that): Imagine you starring into the horizon. There is such an abstract idea in your mind- referring to something which is not something you could experience in real life. There is no such thing as a horizon you can go to. But nonetheless this abstract concept determinates your empirical knowledge: You are here, there is the horizon.
But things light up, when we look not at the concepts the mind is operating with but shifting the focus on the operation as such: On the perception or experience. Only by focusing on the dynamicity of the mind, we can avoid building a metaphysical world out of our ideas of pure reason. Because when we do so, we are solely focused on that we can talk about. We get kind of stuck on our idols.
The Synthesis: The Mystical Experience
There is nothing wrong with using idols to claim our viewpoint, indeed we permanently do so. But if we do like to talk mystical experience, we must avoid doing so. Otherwise we would only hold our concepts for the truth or for a (metaphysical) reality- and do not understand the character of mystical experience: It is the highest form of (logical) synthesis, and beyond the concepts of pure reason.
Only this synthesis is an equivalent for unity or the “unio mystica”: And it is not to be explained with an abstract concept, but an operation or activity. Therefore, it is nearly impossible to speak about mystical experiences, because we do leave the solid-not-so-solid ground of linguistic (representational) signs here – and have to focus on the experience only. And as experience always is immediate, so is mystical experience. You cannot understand the (mystical) unity, you experience it.
Mystical Experience and Emotion
From a philosophical standpoint mystical experience has an interesting aspect to it, though. It should not get confused with sort of an extasy, with the feeling of love or the feeling of blessedness. What we have to avoid, when focussing on the synthesis, namely the operating with abstract ideas, we have to avoid on the level of experiencing the synthesis.
We cannot describe mystical experience with attributes, because these attributes would be idols as well.
Nietzsche says: “Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.” It is not possible to describe the mystical experience with attributes- although we tend to talk about attributes when we talk experiences. We might say: I love you, but when stating so, we add something rational to a prior experience.
As concepts or ideas of reason and attributes of experience may somehow cover the fact in our mundane life that what actually happens is beyond words, in mystical experience the alias-function of the linguistic system is losing its ability to build meaning. Mystical experience leaves the solid ground of shared meaning far behind: We do not share mystical experience with the other people around- the insights do not match the frame of a shared world.
How to speak of Mystical Experience and Insights?
This problem reflects into mystical teachings or when we try to articulate our mystical insights. Little make it sense to those, who did not have had these insights themselves. Hence, the mystic language tends to be cryptic, not logical and adversary. How easy it is for cynics like Bertrand Russel to make fun of it by ignoring the evocative aspects of mystical speech. If we would reduce f. ex. Heraclitus to the obvious meaning of his words “we are and are not”; we of course say: This makes no sense. We cannot be and not be at the same time. But this reduction would mean to ignore the event-like character of these words. It is the impact his words have on our rational thinking.
No more Idols
When making the synthesis and discover the deeper meaning of mystical tradition, we do no longer focus on the letters alone.
“That which is not thought, [yet] which stands in the mist of thought
The unthinkable, supreme mystery! –
Thereon let one concentrate his attention
When a person sees the brilliant ,
Maker, Lord, Person, the Brahama-source,
Then, being a knower, shaking off good and evil,
He reduces everything to unity in the supreme Imperishable.” [1]
This is the great deal we have to make, when trying to understand mysticism. Making the synthesis means killing the idols of reason for a greater good: the coincidence of opposites. No longer then do we see the contrasts of duality, but experience unity.
We “think” the unthinkable and get insights into complexes of meaning far beyond the mundane experience. But as Meister Eckhardt would say: It is not important to do so.
More Philosophy
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[1] B. Mangan, Language and Experience in the Cognitive Study of Mysticism- Commentary on Forman. In: Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1, No. (1994), p. 251.
