Another paper I wrote lately taking further the concept of “Demystify-Remystify”. Based on a chapter on mysticism in a book I was reading for my masters program in transformational psychology, this paper explores the concept of demystifying reality in overcoming spiritualism with a scientific (materialist) approach, and overcoming materialism with openness toward the mystic experience. Enjoy!

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clarke

What is mystical experience? It is typically defined as an experience having a spiritual significance that transcends human understanding and inspiring a sense of spiritual mystery, awe, and fascination. It is further defined as having a spiritual reality or import not apparent to the intelligence or senses. A key component is that it is relating to, or stemming from direct communion with ultimate reality or God. Oftentimes, it is also considered enigmatic, obscure, unintelligible or cryptic, which in part might be a result of its association with mystic rites or practices.

“Mysticism reaches its height in spiritual experience. It is said that all individual religious experience rises from mystical planes of consciousness. All the world religions have embodied this in their teachings and inculcated it in their followers. Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and Moslems all have done this.” (Harris, p.46)

All over the world, different traditions have kept alive the idea of a mystical experience, of a union with something beyond the ordinary human experience. Each has employed different methods and techniques to do so. Each has used different metaphors for the path:

Christianity speaks of the Mystic Way, resulting in “Orison”, union with God: “St. John of the Cross said that in orison the soul is in a union of love with God, reached by contemplation in which God pervades the soul.” (Harris, p.47) “The Mystic way has been defined … as an ‘organic process of transcendence’, which aims at a direct encounter with the Infinite and a glorious fruition thereof” (Chaudhuri p.132)

A Persian Sufi philosopher in the Eleventh Century wrote “that the end of Sufism is total absorption in God” (Harris, p.49). Similarly the Yogi aims for union with the absolute reality, and the Buddhist aims for complete loss of identity in the void:

“The Buddhist in meditation first concentrates on the mind; next, the mind function ceases and unity remains; then the sense of unity goes and indifference sets in; next, the devotee says that nothing exists. There are no ideas and no absence of ideas. He goes on until, in meditation, he comes as close as possible to annihilation, the void, the silence, immersion in the impersonal Buddhist Absolute. The Hindu finds God in meditation; the Buddhist finds the void.” (Harris, p.49)

Even though with slight variations, it appears that the mystical experience is something common to the experience of mankind. Even more apparent than in the big world religions this can be seen in the Native American or African religions. Many of these are much more closely in touch with the source. Their focus on interconnectivity and ingrained traditions of transcendence clearly indicate their understanding that beyond individuality there is a whole that unifies beyond this material world.

Natural man seemed more connected with the source. But as humanity began to discover this material existence more and more, it began to disconnect further and further from the source.

Most clearly this idea is expressed in the myth of the fall from paradise: eating from the tree of good and evil created dualism, and most apparently, the dualism between individual and whole, God and man. In Christian mythology, the fall from paradise is typically considered the original sin. It is curious to note that the word sin stems from sinte, old German for “separation”.

The idea that natural man was more closely connected to the source, and that future man might return to a state of union with the source, corresponds to a variety of other models of reality. A development process such as this also corresponds ideas such as Arthur Young’s theory of process, Timothy Leary’s ideas on ego development, movements on the Qabalistic Tree of Life descending into matter and ascending back into spirit, and also Sri Aurobindo’s observations.

In human development it seems, just as children leave the womb of the mother, we have further and further gone from the source and with that further away also from the mystical experience of oneness toward a state of total duality. Focus on this world led to the development of science and ultimately scientificism – ignoring fully any spiritual force beyond the apparent base materialism of Newton’s physics. Modernist science is based on debunking the mystical experience. Since Descartes liberated science and created dualism of body and soul, focus of Western science has many times been to explain away rather than understand mystical phenomena (fortunately, over the last century science has discovered the model of Quantum physics, which has reconnected it to the source in many ways indicating an integration in the field of science).

On the other hand, spiritualism developed upholding the mystical experience as the only desirable reality, oftentimes shunning material existence altogether. Methods to achieve union with the divine or absolute were often based on asceticism, denial, and (at least metaphorically) self-flagellation: “To use the language of the Christian mystics, the ‘ecstasy of deprivation’ issues in the ‘Orison of Union’ or the glory of ‘Deification’.” (Chaudhuri p.134) While applying methods to connect to the divine, a negative attention was placed on the physical existence: “The joy of the meditation was dampened by the gloom of the theology. Ecstasy of the spirit was pulled down by castigation of the world. It was as if God were loved and glorified as the Creator, but not for what he created.” (Harris, p.48) (Similarly, Buddhism also places at the core of the mystical experience annihilation of self. Not just unity was the goal of the contemplative state, but complete loss of identity in the void).

This negative Catholic theology was one of the reasons Protestantism broke away from the Catholic Church and “modern” forms of Christianity know little of the mystic state, the “Heaven on Earth” of the soul. Protestants interpreted “Heaven on Earth” as a command to be industrious which has given us our modern technological society.

At the same time, mysticism remained ever present: “Mysticism has the aura of reality. There is no spectrum of life into which its hues and colors do not reach like the rainbow spans the earth. The tenor of all human activities reflects its potency and responds to its veiled touch” (Harris, p.45).

While on the surface mystical experience in our society is reserved for the appointed and the crazy, mystical experience as such is alive in each and every one of us even though the expression thereof might have been pushed to the fringes.

We find it first and foremost in intimately personal experience. Even the most materialistic person has had at least moments in childhood when a connection to the absolute was felt and lived. Those memories might be buried underneath the dust of denial, or they might be hidden for fear of being considered crazy – especially as unless appointed one is not supposed to have mystical experiences; it might be deep down, but it is there at all times: “In everyday life also, the individual has mystical intimations by which he feels that he sees beneath the surface of events and circumstances, and looks into the future. People have premonitions or receive intuitions that compel them to prefer one course of action above another, to do this and not that, to stay here or go there” (Harris, p.46)

One of the reasons the mystical experience was removed from each individual and reserved only for the appointed, was as a mechanism of power. By co-opting the mystical experience, religious institutions created a layer between God and the people, and could therefore direct people according to their desires. And, although written on paper, the separation between church and state never seemed to really exist as both use the mystical experience for motivation of the masses to this day.

This has been for “good” and “bad” throughout history. While demagogues such as Hitler abused mysticism to mass-hypnotize a whole country into atrociousness, other statesmen have used it to motivate their people toward something higher: “The greatest statesmen of the race have always been those who, like Lincoln, were able to instill the overtones of the mystic into their operations, and thus to add to the rightness of their cause the magic power of poetry” (Harris, p. 45).

“Poetry itself lives and breathes in the mystical as its proper domain” (Harris, p. 45) – and so do the arts as such. Born out of rites and rituals, art both at the time of production as also at the time of consumption allow access to something higher, something beyond egoic experience. Out of fertility rituals developed Dionysian festivals of orgiastic communion, out of which later the arts of theatre, and ultimately poetry developed. The transcendent experience is at the core of art. Goethe once said that we can’t see God directly. But we can see God in a tree or we can perceive God through a poem about a tree written by someone who saw God in the tree.

After splitting first into the 7 lively arts, and then into a variety of forms, it seems that today’s art to some extent is returning to its sources in combining multiple sensory inputs at the same time addressing all different neurological circuitry the traditional art forms individually reserved. Modern “raves” sometimes remind of Dionysian festivities, the locations and structures are interesting and decorated, adorned with paintings or visual projections; they feature spoken word, objects and sculptures, costumes and play are important features, and most importantly the unifying beats of music, and the individual and collective expression through dance.

Art has immense transformational power. It is curious to note that many of the great artists who have passed the test of time and are still appreciated today were connected to esoteric and sometimes occult traditions, and definitely cherished the mystical experience as a core element of their work. Uninterested in the clichés of exoteric dogma, artists often left this side of religion to the common man, and turned to the wisdom traditions of the world, the Perennial wisdom and the systematic teachings that exist in all cultural realms, and studied the powerful knowledge of conscious transformation toward union with the absolute, while using symbols and archetypes in their works inspiring beholders to this day.

These systematic teachings again can be found throughout different cultures. In the West, we find Gnosticism, Alchemy, Qabalah, Theosophy, Magick, Sufism, we find organizations such as Freemasons, Templars, Rosicrucians, The Golden Dawn, OTO and many others.

In the East, we find a variety of refined methods such as Zen or Tantra. Although varying in their current forms, many of the Eastern religions stem from the same roots. Even though they might slightly differ in their philosophical frameworks, and in the difference between self-denial in the void or identification with the Godhead, they have in common the rigorous approach of self-transformation toward a mystical state: “In Hinduism, the object of meditation if union with God. This system is a detailed spiritual discipline requiring special exercises, posture, diet, mental concentration and ethical purity. By these means the devotee, using what might be called a scientific thoroughness of process, attains ultimate union with God.” (Harris, p.48)

It is this scientific thoroughness that distinguishes these systems from the mystical notions of natural man or even early Christian mysticism. Very similar in their nature, they are based on different premises: “The Mystic Way thus bears very close resemblance to Yoga which is the art of attaining living union with the ultimate Reality though a process of gradual self-transcendence. There is, however, this difference that Yoga is more psychological and philosophical, whereas Christian mysticism is more religious and devotional.” (Chaudhuri p. 132)

It does seem appropriate that there are different paths to this union. In Yoga alone there are a variety of styles to account for the variety of different personality types. This allowed people to develop a strong sense of individuality. In light of the concept of departure and return to the source, this makes perfect sense. Similar to the separation of art into manifold forms of expression, the mystical process as such also needed to find all its different forms as the descent into matter continued to further and further develop the materialistic ego: the bigger this ego the bigger the vessel for the Divine to flow through.

“Methods for inducing meditation also vary widely… The important thing, however, is to open yourself to the Divine Force, so It can descend into you constantly, posses you entirely, and express Itself in you completely. You will then feel the Divine Force settling in you, becoming more and more established. It will replace with Itself the lower motives of the nature which formerly held back your progress.” (Harris, p. 50)

Last century Sri Aurobindo began the integration of the different styles of yoga and also opened the doors for the integration with the Western wisdom traditions and modern Western science: “Purnayoga carries to perfection both the psychological approach and the religious approach, and gives them a synthetic fusion” (Chaudhuri p. 134)

Today, we have the opportunity to integrate even further and continue his work. Through continuous globalization, through the Internet, through interconnected libraries of the world, through a movement of sharing information, we today have available to us the knowledge and wisdom of all ages. If we choose to care, we can learn from them and begin to reintegrate. Through the integration of all the different wisdom traditions and science of East and West and through maintaining a scientific and thorough approach rooted in discipline, we can begin to empirically and personally deduct and experience “universal laws” of existence. Through examining parallels we can begin to demystify the mechanics of reality and become conscious creators in this world.

Anchored in our material existence, we can also begin to communicate with the divine. And while having refined individuality on the one hand, on the other we have union with the divine. While being at the bottom of the Tree of Life, we can look up and rise toward the divine, while allowing the divine to flow down and work through us. The dual path Sri Aurobindo suggests is also based on the idea of raising the material toward the spiritual and at the same time pulling down the spiritual into the material.

The reason for the need for both lies in different functions. To apprehend this sensual reality we require the mind, to apprehend the divine, we require the soul: “…we cannot see the Divine Light through the senses and the mind; but we can discern it through the soul. “ (Harris, p. 51)

Through connecting with our souls, our view set on the infinite, we can achieve a new state of humanity. As St John of the Cross put it: “A single meditation may be sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which the soul, during its entire life, had vainly tried to rid itself and to leave it adorned with virtues and supernatural gifts.” (Harris, p.47)

We can cleanse and purify our material attachments and rise toward a state of super-humanity as Aurobindo suggests. Such a state of union with the divine while fully exploring our individuality within this material reality would be marked by utter delight, as so many of the world’s traditions describe in their own beautiful metaphors. “The Baal-Shem-Tov found joy and holiness in all things and God everywhere. Rise early in the morning, he said, and seize joy with might, for you are sanctified and a new man, and like God, create the world in your own image.” (Harris, p.50)

It is through this delight that we remystify the experience of life itself and experience its magic. Through eating from the Tree of Life, we shall reenter paradise, this time, though, not as natural man, but as conscious co-creators in the image and in loving union with God.

Haridas Chaudhuri, Sri Auribindo: Prophet of the Life Divine, Cultural Integration Fellowship, American Edition, 1973

Obadiah Harris, The New Consciousness, The Philosophical Research Society, 2004