Are You Mystical
Spirited Away - we’re not in Kansas anymore
Many of us have had a certain kind of striking inner experience. Maybe during a walk in the woods transfixed by the beauty of nature, freed of all worry and cares, peaceful and contented. Maybe transported high above the world, touched by an angel, filled with love, joy and understanding. Maybe a veil lifted revealing a profound yet simple mystery or the secret of life. These have been called mystical, transcendental, awakening, or spiritual experiences. They can be associated with paranormal perceptions outside of our normal abilities like foreseeing something about to happen or feeling the presence of someone who recently passed on. They are often experiences of freedom, happiness, joy, ecstasy, peace, relief, or revelation far removed from ordinary experience. (The term Kansas in the subtitle is a metaphorical reference to The Wizard of Oz. Kansas is a great place to live.)
He finally decided that it must have been a delusion.
For most of us if we have these experiences they don’t last long and they don’t happen often. Yet even if it only happens once it can have a lasting impact on us. We might try to make them happen again just by recreating the circumstances. Ansel Adams, one of the best known and most important photographers, said that as a boy he saw the sun shining on flowers on a hillside and felt transported with joy. He said that his purpose in making nature photographs was to recreate that experience. An academic professor of mystical schools once had a mystical experience while standing on a hillside at sunrise. He was so moved by it that he went back to that same place at sunrise many times seeking to repeat it - but it never happened again. He finally decided that it must have been a delusion; a type of mental aberration that he believes is the actual source of the mystical traditions. Sigmund Freud, who never had such an experience, believed that mystical experience is the expression of psychological dysfunction.
Many people have a longing for transcendent experience.
Charles Trenet, musician, painter, poet, novelist, screenwriter and actor, one of the most loved French singer-songwriters, wrote a classic hit song La Mer [The Sea] which came to him suddenly during World War II. He was riding on a train, looking out the window at a big lagoon in the rain. The song is a beautiful painting recreating that moment in time. It not only brings to life a vivid image of nature, it also captures the feeling Trenet had looking at it, a feeling of tremendous liberation and joy. He felt comforted and loved. These episodes of transcendent illumination can come to us for no reason suddenly amid the troubles of life. Trenet recognized the triumph of an incontestable higher truth transcending the physical struggle to survive which is the source of our suffering and anxiety. He attributed it to the spirit of the sea. Poets, painters and musicians often have such experiences regarding them as artistic inspiration. For the ancient Greeks artistic inspiration was a divine mystical state. You can easily find one of Trenet’s earlier recordings of this song and the English translation of the original French lyrics on the Internet (A completely different non-mystical English version of the tune also became popular).
Sometimes people have had mystical experiences, maybe long ago in childhood, but have forgotten them. If you cast back over your life, sitting comfortably with eyes closed, you might recall one. They
make an indelible impression. The more you put your attention on reliving a memory in a relaxed way the more vividly you can recall it.
Many people have an intuition about the possibility of transcendent experience and a longing for it. This intuition is described in the popular song “Over the Rainbow”, lyrics by Yip Harburg for The Wizard of Oz, about a place where there are no troubles. The song evokes a yearning for a possibility we have never known, yet that calls out to us. Israel Kamakawiwo'ole made a moving recording of the song in 1993.
The tremendous popularity of songs like this shows that everyone has a deep feeling relationship to mystical states whether or not they consider them to be realistic.
Why do some people have these experience and others not? What brings them about? Why are they so uncommon? These experiences can even isolate us from family and friends who cannot understand them. Our teachers and even our religious leaders often can’t answer or even accept our questions about them. Just as one example, about a billion people are members of the Roman Catholic Church.
The official position of the Church follows the early church fathers, who acknowledged mystical experiences as “the aspirations of the soul, but, at the same time, they emphasized its essential inability to penetrate the mysteries of Divine life.” In other words, we can’t hope to get real mystical experiences. We should rely instead on faith in the Church to earn us both happiness and understanding in the afterlife.
Forbidden Planet - don’t go there!
Relying on faith and waiting for the afterlife is not the view of the many great mystical wisdom traditions that come down to us from ancient times. They tell us to go there. True, our spontaneous mystical experiences of divine life are often hard to repeat. It may have happened to us once years ago and never again. They might leave us more dissatisfied than before with our ordinary state by comparison. Their purpose though may be to let us know of the greater reality and our potential to live it, so we can begin to seek out sources of knowledge. The wisdom traditions tell us that these experiences are brief flashes of higher states of consciousness. They tell us that people do have the potential to rapidly evolve in consciousness so that these higher states become more and more common until they are permanent, and that to accomplish this people most often need the assistance of the special instruction and conditions of a mystical school.
Can our consciousness evolve into new domains?
Yet it’s easy to agree with the Roman Church. It does seem impossible to “penetrate the mysteries of divine life.” The major religions all disagree with each other. They all claim to be the one true religion and ask us to believe their stories, but they can’t all be correct. If we don’t accept their authority then why should we believe in the ancient mystical wisdom traditions? If anyone was able to prove the secret of life then people would not still be searching for it. People usually can’t even improve their dispositions let alone become divine. People can change their beliefs, their religion, their career, their spouse. They can get surgery to change their physical appearance. They even get years of professional therapy to cure neurosis. In the end, they are usually still the same people with a similar life experience. Given that, it must be terribly difficult to change so deeply that we embody divine qualities. If it were possible then why isn’t everyone doing it?
The most intense thinking of our most brilliant philosophers over thousands of years has only gone round and round in circles. Hard science like physics has accomplished wonders gaining knowledge about the natural world but at least until now is unable to deal with the most important topic, the human spirit. Even the soft science of psychology has not made much progress. Therapists have had to resort to drugging people including children en masse to get consistent results. The more material wealth our society gets the more people need to take daily antidepressant drugs. The good thing is they can afford them.
Great artists have captured this hopeless quality of modern life without spiritual or metaphysical truth. I believe Franz Kafka’s novel “The Castle” is about our inability to penetrate the divine. The main character, K, is seeking direction from a higher authority about his purpose and the justification for his existence. It’s by penetrating the divine life that we can find an objective place, value and purpose in the world, but for Kafka there is no access to the divine life. K knows there is a higher authority but all his efforts to contact it fail. Nor is there a divine life for the existential philosophers and writers like Nietzsche, and later Albert Camus and Paul Sartre, who believed “God is dead”, meaning that traditional religious beliefs about the divine were abandoned as false by intellectuals in the modern era with nothing to replace them. The existentialists concluded that we have to get by without divine insight and manufacture our own purpose as best we can. They portray a dark vision of life as futile struggle and suffering.
Nobel Prize winner W. B. Yeats translated The Ten Principle Upanishads.
Such artists, intellectuals and religious leaders, giants in their fields, were not able to access higher states of consciousness so they rejected mysticism as a delusion. Many other Western artists did have mystical experiences, like Charles Trenet, and some were even followers of mystical teachings and practices. Examples of famous English language poets who seriously studied mysticism include William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Nobel Prize winner W.B. Yeats. Mystical novelists include Aldous Huxley and Henry Miller. From our own time Gary Snyder is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and dedicated
mystical practitioner. Allen Ginsberg, Vajrayana Buddhist practitioner, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award winner. Many of the important artists who created modern art like Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock were mystics. They were inspired by mystical experiences, studied mystical books, engaged in special exercises to evoke mystical consciousness and participated in schools of mysticism. They wrote extensively of their aim to capture specific types of mystical states on canvas. Other artists like Kazimir Malevich and Mark Rothko said they had that same intention, even though they did not actually participate in mystical schools as far as we know. You can judge their success if you find their works in a museum; reproductions may not be effective. We study the famous writers and artists in secondary school but the importance of mystical experience to many of them is usually left out. More recently, the popular contemporary songwriters Cat Stevens, George Harrison, Leonard Cohen and Alanis Morissette all have made special efforts to seek mystical experiences which inspire their work. If you prefer classical music then Alexander Scriabin, John Cage and Philip Glass are in the same big bag.
This is not just true about the arts. There have been many prominent openly mystical philosophers in the West, including Thomas Taylor, William James, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In spite of frequent persecution, there have been many mystics within the Western Roman Church. Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila and her follower the poet John of the Cross are the most famous of many mystic clerics. In modern times Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and poet, even advocated importing Asian mystical ideas and methods into the Church. Unlike some of his medieval predecessors he was not burned at the stake. I guess they don’t do that anymore.
Looking beyond Europe and Western culture, mystics of all times and places have used art to communicate mystical insights and feelings in painting, poetry, music, sculpture and philosophical writings. The cultures of the Middle East, India and Asia have celebrated numberless mystical poets, painters and philosophers. The West is on the long road to overcome racism and has begun to appreciate other cultures. Westerners today might be familiar with Rumi, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Li Bai, Meera, Kabir, and many other mystical authors. Mystical poetry goes back to the very beginning of recorded history. Enheduanna was a beautiful Akkadian princess, Sumerian poet and the high priestess of Inanna who wrote about invoking the divine 4,300 years ago. She is the earliest author whose name we know. Because of her poems, highly regarded in her time, we know something about her life and her character. Amazingly, a relief sculpture of her has survived. Some 2600 years later, the Roman Emperor Julian, a mystic, poet and author, described Neoplatonic theurgic practices that invoked divinities.
This huge body of mystic art from the very dawn of history to the present moment is evidence that either the divine life is accessible to us, (or alternatively that mystical experience is a common mental illness of the poetically gifted).
Darby O'Gill and the Little People– who’s going to believe you?
Many cultures have accepted mystical experience as a guiding reality.
Western civilization for thousands of years has focused its efforts on knowledge and control of the natural world with great success, but it has also neglected this other important side of human experience. Today Western civilization is no longer Western. All peoples of the world are participating in a global civilization as peers. As humanity has mastered the natural world and our population has exploded, it encounters more and more serious threats to its survival through violence and pollution.
This is exactly the kind of unintelligent behavior that higher consciousness can prevent. Today and in the future humanity badly needs people who can have these mystical experiences and who cultivate them.
Yet our society as a whole does not recognize mysticism as valid, let alone as an important human project. It’s not helpful to put mystical experience on your professional résumé if you want a job.
Many other societies have accepted mystical experiences as a reality. India and China have been centers of civilization and empire from prehistoric times down to the present day. At certain periods of time they were ruled by governments that supported Buddhism, an ancient teaching on mystical experience and enlightenment, as a national endeavor, the way modern nations support space exploration. Tibetan society was focused on seeking enlightenment for a thousand years.
Our materialistic society might judge them as being fooled by superstition or as using religion to control oppressed people. Many who believe in science argue that mysticism is not scientific so it must be a fantasy, a delusion or a con. Mysticism, they say, cannot compete for truth with science. You can’t prove that someone had a mystical experience or that they are enlightened. There has not been experimental proof of paranormal perceptions or phenomena rigorous enough to be accepted by the scientific community. Mysticism can’t send astronauts to the moon, create vaccines, or kill staggeringly large numbers of people, the way science can. One reason Europe was able to dominate the world militarily and economically from the 16th century was European science and technology. Widespread mystical schools in India, China, and Southeast Asia did not save them from the fate of European exploitation, Japan being the one fortunate exception to conquest by Western nations.
Some important people in the history of science also studied mysticism.
Scientific definitions of reality are second only to religious dogma in providing reasons to deny mystical experience. It might be surprising to you then, as it was to me, that many important people in the birth of modern science were also mystics. Following is a very brief survey of major scientists who were key to the evolution of science who also studied mysticism. This is supposed to show that mysticism and science do not necessarily contradict each other. Science does not disprove mysticism. If it did the brains of all these mystic scientists would have exploded. As it happens, I checked. Not one of their brains exploded. I’m sure someone would have noticed. In the last decades science has begun to grapple with its inability to explain the world as we perceive it.
For many contemporary people science defines reality and leaves no room for mysticism. Yet science cannot explain our experience of the qualia, the appearances in our minds that we call colors, sounds, and so forth. It cannot explain our experience of a specific present time, the present, privileged above all other times. It cannot explain why there is anything at all rather than nothing. While some people dedicated to scientific materialism hope some day to solve these riddles, other noted scientific thinkers believe a major revamping of science will be needed, and others think that these questions are possibly forever beyond our ability to answer. At the very least, these major gaps between reality and science mean that, at least for now, science does not disprove mystical experience.
Science like mysticism discovers truth
through direct experience.
I will briefly mention some of the key mystics in the history of science from very ancient times to the present along with some of the schools of mysticism they studied. If you are willing to take my word for this then you can skip the next the section. If you already know all about the relationship of mysticism to the history of science you can skip the next section. If you don’t care you can safely skip the next section. It’s not necessary for understanding the article. I skipped it myself and I wrote it, so if you do read it please let me know how it turned out.
The next section does not try to be complete. It’s just a short arbitrary list of mystic scientists. It does not even mention the very important contributions of Islamic civilization and Indian civilization to the development of Western science during the Middle Ages. There were important Chinese contributions as well. It does not discuss how the ancient Greeks first learned math and science along with a lot of other culture from the thousands of years older non-European civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The scholar Thomas McEvilley among others held the view that the Greek rational investigation of the natural world, the seed of modern science, was inspired by contact with the Indian philosophy of the mystic Vedas and Upanishads. All that we need for our purpose here to defend mystical experience as harmonious with science, even supportive of it, is to list a few of the more important scientists who definitely were also mystics and whose brains did not explode. The list focuses on Europe where modern science reached its maturity in Newton’s Principia. One proposed influence on the birth of science is the re-discovered ancient mystical Hermetic and Neoplatonic books. The books advised individuals to find truth through direct experience, not from reason, authority or divine revelation. These teachings undermined European political, religious and academic authorities, encouraging people to question authority and seek answers through investigation. Science like mysticism discovers truth through direct experience. For science the subject is the physical world and the experiences are measurements, observations and experiments. This hypothesis is supported by the list of people who were both mystics and developers of science. Another influence was the infusion of Muslim science into Europe, a side effect of the crusades. Muslims inherited ancient Greek science and made many important advances in medieval times. Europe also came into contact with Chinese knowledge and ideas that were proto- scientific. Europe benefits from its position as a crossroads, easily accessible to Africa, the Middle East, and all of Asia, so it became a meeting ground of cultural ideas. Even the far East, China, began a cultural exchange with Europe through the Jesuits in the 17th century, influencing the early scientist Leibnitz.
Monkey Business – when mysticism meets science
We start in ancient Greece, near the beginning of their written history, with Pythagoras of Samos who died about 495 BC. You likely know his name from the famous Theorem of Pythagoras about right triangles that we are still learning in secondary school 2,500 years later. The theorem is fundamental to geometry and has widespread practical use. The proof was attributed to him in ancient Greece, along with figuring out the relative wavelengths of the musical notes. His school was also responsible for other early developments in mathematics including the very concept of a mathematical proof. Pythagoreans taught that the natural world followed mathematical relationships which they tried to figure out; they believed this for mystical reasons. This was the beginning of the modern scientific project to explain the operation of the natural world using mathematical formulas. It was Pythagoreans who first proposed that the earth moves in an orbit rather than sitting still in the center of the universe. Their school produced a number of important astronomers.
Pythagoras was also a philosopher who had a large influence on Plato, the single most important thinker in Western philosophy. The school of Pythagoras was primarily, though, a school of mystical realization. The Pythagoreans were a community dedicated to awakening by means of special practices to elevate awareness through a series of levels of being. Mathematics and astronomy were part of their mystical research. The ancient Greeks considered Pythagoras to be the founder of Greek mystical philosophy.
Pythagorean schools flourished for 700 years.
Skipping forward about 900 years to the Roman Empire, uniting vast areas and multiple cultures, Hypatia of Alexandria in the fourth century AD was the head of a Neoplatonic school of mysticism. We know she was proficient in mathematics, buoyancy and astronomy. Neoplatonic schools arose within the Roman Empire in the 3rd century AD and flourished until they were suppressed in the 6th century. The Roman Emperor Julian was a practitioner and supporter. They taught various organized practices to bring about mystical experience which they explained by an extensive philosophy and metaphysics based on Plato.
Hermetic mystical schools became popular about a century earlier, combining Greek traditions with the influence of older Egyptian teachings. They were based on books attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, meaning Hermes Thrice-greatest, which took their final Greek form during the 1st through 3rd centuries AD. Hermes was the Greek name of the Egyptian god Thoth. One of the Thoth’s Egyptian titles was “thrice great.” He was the deity of many things including prominently writing, science, wisdom and magic. The books cover metaphysics, mystical experience and wisdom, astrology, alchemy, pharmacology, magic and other topics. They had a big influence on early European proto-scientists and scientists.
Next we skip another 600 years to the Middle Ages. The Roman Empire is now history along with its pagan religions. Europe consists of Christian kingdoms and the Muslim world has already fragmented into multiple dynasties. The Byzantine Empire, a surviving fragment of the old Roman Empire, lay between West and East. Key people of the Middle Ages for the evolution of our modern form of science who were also students of mysticism include the Persian Avicenna and the English Roger Bacon. They pioneered the scientific method based on experimentation. They were strongly influenced by both the ancient Neoplatonic and Hermetic schools.
In the 15th century the Byzantine Empire, which had preserved Hellenic culture, fell to the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Byzantine scholars fled west helping to begin a Renaissance of classical culture in Western Europe. Among the books they brought were many from the Neoplatonic and Hermetic schools. Cosimo di Giovanni de' Medici and Marsilio Ficino popularized these mystical teachings, even forming a new Neoplatonic school. These books helped to create the Renaissance and Enlightenment shifts in paradigm. They were important or even central to the many changes in world view, influencing major mystical philosophers, poets, and artists as well as important early scientists.
Neoplatonism affected ideas about space, time, natural law and causality. The Greek Hermetic books were particularly influential with scientists because they included efforts to understand and control nature, like astrology, alchemy, chemistry, and pharmacology. Modern chemistry and astronomy evolved directly from ancient alchemy-chemistry and astrology-astronomy which were not differentiated in ancient times. The Swiss Paracelsus was a 15th century mystic, astrologer and physician who studied Neoplatonic and Hermetic books. He was revolutionary in basing his medicine on
observation rather than accepted ancient authority and made many important advances in medicine, pharmacology and chemistry. He invented the word chemistry and used chemical knowledge as a basis for making medicines. He first used clinical diagnosis to decide on specific treatments. He insisted on cleaning wounds instead of putting dung on them. He objected to bloodletting as a treatment. He invented or advocated the use of laudanum as a painkiller. He first studied toxicology.
In the 15th century Nicolaus Copernicus advocated the heliocentric model of the solar system. He was inspired by, or at least encouraged by, the ancient Pythagorean astronomical theories where the Earth moved in an orbit. Copernicus admired the mystical ideas of the Pythagoreans and also quotes from Hermetic mystical books in his scientific writings. The influential Italian mystic, philosopher and scientist Giordano Bruno was an influential philosopher and mystic who re-discovered and promoted the ancient mystical teachings of the Corpus Hermeticum and Neoplatonism in Europe. He also was instrumental in the evolution of a science of rational enquiry based on observation and experiment. He actively promoted Copernicus’ heliocentric model against vigorous opposition. Bruno was a student of the Neoplatonic and Hermetic teachings which he used in his defense of the new cosmology. Bruno believed the stars in the sky were just like our sun, and had planets orbiting round them, possibly with intelligent life. As far as I know, he was the first to deduce this correct view of the universe so different from previous cosmologies. Bruno believed in an atomic theory of matter. He was a mathematician, and did laboratory experiments that, at the time, were identified as alchemical, the predecessor of chemisty.
The Catholic Church burned Bruno at the stake for his heretical beliefs, which he bravely presented on the public stage in spite of the danger to him.
The adoption of the heliocentric model promoted by Copernicus is one of the key events in the history of modern science leading over the next 200 years to Johannes Kepler’s discovery of elliptic planetary orbits and Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of motion and of gravity. Kepler also did work in optics. He applied mathematical formulas believing they guided nature. Kepler studied ancient Neoplatonic texts and was inspired in his work by those mystical ideas. Newton was influenced by Neoplatonic ideas in his formulation of scientific concepts. Newton tried to put into practice the teachings of the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of Hermetic mystical writings. The five big names in the scientific revolution that changed our view of the natural world are Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei, Kepler and Newton. Three of them were inspired by ancient Greek mystical teachings. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who is co-credited with inventing modern calculus with Newton, was a Neoplatonist himself.
Mysticism is inherently subversive of human authorities and of the social order because each person is working toward their own direct perception of the true and the good, not relying on faith in books, human authorities, or religious dogma. We are very fortunate today to have freedom of speech and religion, which historically is likely due in part to the revival of subversive mystical Hermetic and Neoplatonic thought during the European Enlightenment. The motto of the politically liberal Enlightenment was Sapere aude, "Dare to know." The Enlightenment of the 18th century brought us democracy, science, religious tolerance, personal freedom and most importantly Neapolitan pizza. Pizza we all know is the special food that enabled the invention of computer software and the internet.
Skip forward 150 years to the start of the 20th century and the modern era. There is another scientific paradigm shift to the modern physics. Werner Heisenberg said that he was in India studying
enlightenment teachings with a famous teacher of mystical enlightenment, Jiddu Krishnamurti, while he was in the process of formulating Quantum Mechanics. Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize for his work, said those spiritual teachings had inspired his theory. David Bohm was another physicist working in quantum mechanics who sought out Krishnamurti.
Ernst Mach, Wolfgang Pauli, and Neils Bohr among the most significant physicists of the early 20th century, were all familiar with and sympathetic to mystical ideas and traditions to some degree. Pauli believed in a future synthesis of mysticism, as in Buddhist or Christian teachings on enlightenment or theosis, with science.
Quantum Mechanics along with Relativity is the basis of modern physics that has brought us a much deeper understanding of the natural world. Yukawa Hideki was a Nobel Prize winning Japanese particle physicist and a dedicated Buddhist practitioner. He said his important theoretical advance relied on Buddhist teachings. He hoped Eastern mystical ideas would humanize Western science-based civilization.
From the earliest European scientists in antiquity through the creators of the scientific method up to some of the greatest modern scientists, prominent people of science have had no problem at all embracing materialistic science and mysticism at the same time. They understood them to be complementary. In many cases mystical ideas inspired or motivated their scientific advances. This mystical guidance and inspiration of scientific advances is well documented. If someone says “mystical awakening cannot be real because science proves we can only know what our everyday five senses tell us” then they are definitely mistaken according to these and other great men and women of science. Whether or not mystical experience is real, science does not tell us. When people believe that science is the one and only way to get to truth that is called scientism. Scientism is not the same as science and has been denied by many great scientists, including mystics, non-mystics and avowed atheists.
The soft science of psychology is even more open to mysticism. Psychology is the closest Western discipline to mysticism because it is also about transforming and healing the human mind. Carl Jung was a famous mystic and psychologist in the first half of the 20th century. Since the 60’s there have been several prominent psychotherapists who worked with mystical ideas, like Abraham Maslow and Fritz Perls. Today there are many scientists doing medical research on adapting mystical practices for mental health.
We sometimes doubt mystical experience because it seems to contradict our everyday common-sense experience of things, of who we are and what is possible for us. There are many articles, books and movies about the fact that modern science, quantum physics and relativity, strongly contradict our everyday experience of things and of what is possible. They contradict our intuition so strongly that even physicists like Einstein have had a hard time believing in them. Because it shows that our everyday common-sense beliefs about reality are false, modern science might encourage us to at least be open minded about the strange things that mystics say are true. Things are not always as they appear. Some mystics like Alan Watts, Fritjof Capra and Itzhak Bentov have even written popular books about ways that modern physics confirms the claims of mystics.
Lost Horizon – a hidden country
In spite of the notable exceptions of some prominent mystic scientists, clerics, authors and artists, our society as a whole and its leaders and professionals are largely blind to mystical experience. This is, according to mystics, because the mystical experience has its source beyond the world of material appearance. Most people have not had or don’t remember having any mystical experience. The divine country is our lost horizon. Because mystical perceptions contradict the evidence of ordinary appearances and because there is no physical evidence for them such people naturally consider them to be mere delusions or lies. The sources of mystical experience cannot be weighed or measured. They are not visible to the eye. According to the ancient schools some of them are not even located in normal space and time. As human beings we have the faculties to perceive the divine life, the hidden Shangri-la, but our culture has forgotten about them and they lie dormant. These faculties are lost parts of our totality as beings. Sometimes circumstances re-connect these lost parts and as a consequence we have a mystical experience. However extraordinary mystical experience is to our usual selves it is just the normal functioning of these lost parts. One person’s mystical experience is another person’s ordinary one.
A simple example of a lost ability natural to humans is ear wiggling. Only 10 to 20 per cent of people can do this even though everyone may have the necessary muscles and nerves. If a person has never done it
for many years then they have lost touch with the ability of their brain to move these ear muscles. If you have never wiggled your ears, try to do it. I have done it myself often in the past but even so right now I cannot. Most people have no idea how to go about it. We can wiggle our finger just by an act of will (try to describe in words how you do that!) but we have no idea how to wiggle our ears. Yet with patient persistent training many can learn to do it because it is a natural ability. It helps a lot to have instruction from someone who knows how to guide people to access this ability, even though it is totally natural and built-in, because our conscious minds have lost their connection to it. Mystical experience is just like ear wiggling. Some people naturally can do it, most can’t without special help, and everyone can get much better at it with the right instruction. Just as you cannot tell anyone clearly what you do to move your finger, connecting to our lost potential cannot be described in a few simple written instructions. It requires special training tuned to each person.
If we want to get more mystical experiences, or deeper ones, it might help to know what the forgotten parts of our being are. What are these forgotten mystical ear-wiggling muscles? The writings from those ancient societies have something to say about that.
Back to the Future – postmodern ancients
Ancient is not always bad. Modern artists have often been inspired by ancient art, for example Picasso had an interest in Ice Age sculpture from about 25,000 years ago. Egyptian painting, jewelry and architecture have seen revivals in modern times. Writers have been influenced by ancient books, for example the major modern poet Ezra Pound was strongly influenced by ancient Egyptian and Chinese poetry. Because our society has in the mainstream turned away from mystical experience we can learn a lot about it from ancient cultures. It is one area of life that we have not made that much progress in as a society.
The most ancient spiritual documents in India, among the oldest in the world, call the lost parts of our totality as beings “koshas” or sheaths, which they compare to the layers of the onion. The outer sheath is our physical body. The inner ones are not made of physical materials and operate in higher worlds or “lokas”. Buddhism also describes a number of subtle levels of awareness, each a different mind corresponding to increasingly less illusory dimensions or worlds. Buddhism’s oldest books, the Pali Suttas, speak of 31 realms or planes of existence. As meditators progress to subtle levels of mind their attention is able to enter the highest planes. The role of subtle bodies or dimensions of mind pervades many other Indian spiritual paths including Saivism and many kinds of Yoga.
We have met Neoplatonism, a highly regarded mystical teaching of the Roman Empire. It developed one of the most elaborate descriptions of the multiple levels of mind, or soul and mind, and of reality. It first used the now popular term higher planes for these levels. It taught a series of stages of practices of
several different types to reach the higher planes. Many of their books have survived including some descriptions of their mystical exercises. The Hermetic mystical tradition thrived during the same time and place. This school is quite different from Neoplatonism but it also taught about a set of higher inner worlds leading to truth and wisdom and how to experience them. When all pagan teachings were banned in the Roman Empire the Neoplatonic schools were disbanded. Teaching and even practicing Neoplatonic mysticism carried the death penalty, but Neoplatonism was then adapted by Christian, Islamic, and Jewish mystical lineages. People of faith in those religions, who had mystical insight, recognized the value of the Neoplatonic teachings and found them compatible, after some changes, with their beliefs. The mystical traditions that have survived within these faith-based religions thus share many common conceptions about the inner ascent to truth. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life for example can be understood as a diagram of the higher planes. This influence persisted through to medieval and even modern philosophy. The highly influential postmodern philosopher Jacque Derrida, for example, wrote about the close similarity between his philosophy and that of the Christian Neoplatonist Pseudo- Dionysius. Many scholars have written about the similarity of postmodern “deconstruction” philosophy to Buddhism.
In late antiquity and during the middle ages there were also divergent Christian sects that taught mysticism. They are called gnostic, meaning knowledge based, sects because they taught that mystical experience gives salvation through direct knowledge of the divine. Christian Gnosticism, Pagan Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism all originated in the mystical flowering of late Roman antiquity. Pagans are generally very tolerant of other sects and schools. The Western Roman Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and also the Protestant Churches, each claim to be the one fully true representative of the divine on Earth. The only way to get knowledge of the divine is to believe what they tell you about it on faith. In the past to protect that authority they killed mystics. The major Christian Gnostic sects, including the Valentinians, Cathars and Bogomils, were once widespread throughout large regions. You won’t find any Valentinians, Cathars or Bogomils today. The Christian authorities murdered them all, men women and children, until none were left. They also sought out and killed their leaders one by one and burned their books. As a result we don’t know have much detail about the teachings of the Christian Gnostics but they shared the concept of levels of reality and an ascent back to the source to know the divine. Christian Gnostics used to attend Neoplatonic lectures and even schools. The history of repression of mysticism in Christendom is one reason that in seeking ancient mystical knowledge today we often look to Asia. The other is the excellent Asian cuisine. Did you know that Italians learned how to make pasta from the Chinese? It makes you think.
All these ancient schools of mysticism teach that mystical experience happens when we connect to these higher parts of our being. Mystical experiences can be as short as a few seconds or as long as days. Mystical experiences can be amazing, unusual, and revelatory. Mystical experiences of freedom can also seem so natural and ordinary we may not even be aware that we are having them. This is actually common for the same reason that in dreams we usually don’t remember our waking life, and in waking life we usually don’t remember our dreams. We can learn to recognize subtle mystical experiences. Our mind accepts whatever state it is in as normal, and even tends to assume it will never be different.
When we are in love we believe it is forever. When we are depressed we don’t believe we can ever be happy again. It is even hard to remember what other states of mind are like, as if each state has a separate memory and personal history. Because of this we may not remember a mystical experience, or really remember what it was like. We won’t be able to see the world and act in the world from a
mystical perspective just because we remember a mystical experience we once had. The goal of mysticism is not to remember, think about, discuss or try to apply our past mystical experiences. It is the much more challenging task of connecting to the higher parts of our totality as beings.
The type of mystical experience we have depends on which part of our being has been temporarily connected. Each experience is unique but experiences that come from the same part of our being share some general qualities. One important insight that comes from the teaching of many higher planes and corresponding levels of our own minds is that mystical experiences can be as different from each other as they are from our ordinary state of mind. Levels closer to our ordinary level are less obviously remarkable but are important to recognize because they are necessary and accessible steps to reconnecting to even higher levels. As we connect from level to deeper level we become more emotionally free, more perceptive, more capable, and more wise. We might even gain certain abilities.
When one of these parts is turned on for any reason we will automatically have the corresponding type of mystical experience, which is just the normal functioning of that part in the same way our waking experience is the normal functioning of our physical body and its nervous system. If it is not turned on then no matter how hard we try or wish we can’t have that experience. If it is turned on we will have that sort of experience, without needing to wish or make any special effort. Unconditional spiritual love is like that. Religions can tell us we should love everyone, but that love is a function of a part of us that is not now connected. When we are complete we see that unconditional love is the best option and are able to choose it. This is the reason that religions that advise us that we should love each other often end up inspiring fanatical violence instead. One of Jesus’ most important messages is to love our enemies and turn the other cheek, yet in medieval times the various Churches frequently sponsored mass murder. Somebody’s higher parts were not connected. All of these ancient mystical schools teach us that what we need to be free, happy and creative- not to mention good- is to learn how we can re- connect to all the levels of our own being.
The Wizard of Oz – thinking, feeling and chopping
By means of examples from our ordinary life experience we can get an idea of what it means to have different, distinct parts of our being. It is easy for us to identify internal experiences as either physical sensations and movements, emotional feelings, or mental thoughts. Sight, touch, and thirst all are examples of physical sensations AKA sensing. Our body’s ability to move both consciously, as in lifting our arm, and unconsciously, as in our heartbeat, are easily identified as physical movements. Love and irritation are emotions AKA feelings. These very words you are reading are forming ideas in your mind in the form of mental thoughts. With care and attention we can usually easily identify a specific internal experience as either a perceived sensation or movement, an emotion, or a thought. At any given time we are having all three of them and they are constantly changing, but with our attention we can separate out these three distinct streams of internal events. Today therapists often ask people “What are you feeling?” They are training people to be able to be more aware of what emotion they are having at any time. Anyone can learn to do this.
A young enough child can tell a cat from a dog but cannot explain to you how they know this. They can’t
put the difference in words. I remember being unable to do this even when I was quite old. Zoologists though can explain it in great detail. For example a cat’s spine is supple for sudden pouncing and climbing, while a dog’s is rigid for endurance on long chases. Even as an older child though, my use of this feature to identify cats from dogs was subliminal. I could not articulate it, I was not fully aware of it, until I looked up the zoology.
In the same way if we examine our internal experiences we can come up with verbal descriptions of how sensations, emotions and thoughts are different from each other. Even though sensations, like cats, are all different from each other, they are much more different from emotions than from each other, or even than cats are from dogs. The emotions of love and anger are quite different but they have something in common that obviously distinguishes them from thoughts. A fun and informative exercise is to try to make a written list of the qualities that identify internal events as either sensation, emotion or thought. How is it that you can tell which is which?
We all ascribe our sensations and movements to functions of our physical body. We can call that part of us that receives sensations and controls movement by a name, the physical body-mind. We can call it a type of mind because our physical body is able to process, interpret, and coordinate sensations and movements in a complex way using specialized nerves and brain structures. Our body can even learn new automatic movements which is called muscle memory or motor learning. It has its own preferences and attractions, for example for certain postures and movements, for a certain temperature range, or for certain physical appearances in other people. It has cravings for certain foods, often based on nutritional needs. Different traditions use different terms for this complex physical functionality. It has been called our physical body, our moving center, annamaya kosha or foodstuff sheath, form (because it has physical form), meat body, or one of many other terms.
We can also by analogy to our physical body consider the part of us that generates emotions as an emotional body, AKA emotion-being-part, emotional center or emotional level of mind. We can consider that part of us that generates thoughts as a thought body, AKA thought-being-part, thinking mind, or mental center. It may turn out in the future that science can prove that the emotions we experience are completely products of parts of our physical body, and the same may turn out to be true for thoughts.
Whatever their actual makeup is, we can consider the parts responsible for emotions together as a functional unit called the emotional body or emotional body-mind. There is even a scientific theory of anatomy called the triune brain that divides our human brain up into three sections. One section processes moving, sensory, and internal body functions. The other two parts are the places for emotions and thinking. The physical part comprises the basal ganglia, brainstem and cerebellum. The emotional part is the limbic system and the thinking part is the neocortex. It’s a simplified scheme but it shows there is anatomic support for what we see when we look into our own minds, that there are three distinct categories of internal events.
By examining our inner experience we can see how we are made of different parts that function independently but influence each other. They interact. An emotion can call up a thought, and thinking about something can evoke an emotion. Thoughts and emotions can lead us to take actions. Each part is needed for our total functioning as a being. What the mystery schools say is that we have more parts than these three but we have forgotten about them. The forgotten parts process mystical experiences of
different kinds. That is why according to mystics of many times and places we cannot access the divine life as we are now.
Total Recall – you may have forgotten more than you ever knew
Our best evidence for the reality of mystical experiences is not what other people have said no matter how many of them or if they are famous artists, poets, authors, priests or scientists. The best evidence is our own memories of mystical experience. Seeing is believing. They can give us the courage to follow a path into a region that is not recognized by our present mainstream society, nor maybe by our friends, family, and society’s leaders and authorities. These experiences not only seem real to us they seem hyper-real, more real than our normal perceptions. From our perspective during a mystical experience our normal waking state seems confused and unconscious, missing important abilities and unable to perceive certain clear realities.
To get an idea of what this means consider that while we are dreaming we are convinced of the reality of our dream perceptions, of our ability to think and understand, and of the reality of the people in our dreams. When we wake up though, if we make a special effort to recall our dreams, in comparison it is beyond any doubt that we are now in the real world, and our dream perceptions were imaginary, or we might consider that they might be real but of some phantom dimension. We know that now we are thinking clearly but in our dream we had a very poor ability to remember anything even if it just happened. In our dreams we could not reason or plan well. Our waking perceptions have a solid reality to them that dream perceptions don’t have. People who are awake don’t say that their dreaming experience was the real one and now they are in an illusion, but the opposite. In a similar way our perceptions during a mystical experience are more real to us, more undeniable, than even our normal
waking perceptions. Because deep sleep, REM sleep, and being awake are daily experiences they are good examples of how disconnecting parts of our totality affects our state of consciousness.
When we go to sleep at night our emotional body-mind and thinking body-mind are disconnected to a large degree from our physical body-mind. In dreams, we see and hear things that are generated or perceived by our mind without using our bodily senses. We move our imaginary dream body, but our physical body doesn’t move at all. At the same time our body does not talk expressing our thoughts when we talk in our dreams. Usually. Our real face doesn’t express our dream emotions because our physical body is disconnected from the other two parts of our being. In deep non-REM sleep we don’t even have emotions or thoughts. Then all three of our being parts are disconnected from our experience. We aren’t in direct control of these connections. We can’t intentionally disconnect or connect a part of our totality the way we can lift our arm. We have to “fall” asleep in a process we can only influence indirectly. It’s even more difficult for us to reconnect to a disconnected part. In deep sleep we can’t intentionally start REM sleep, dreaming, because we don’t have intention at all. From dreams it’s quite difficult to wake up, even in the unusual case when we realize we are dreaming. The connection and disconnection happen automatically according to our biological needs.
Because in our ordinary waking state we are disconnected from our higher being-parts Sufis sometimes call that state “walking sleep” or just sleep, by analogy to dreaming sleep and deep sleep which are disconnected from our ordinary waking state. Buddha means the awakened one. The Buddhist term for the knowledge of Buddha is bodhi, awakening, not enlightenment as it is rendered in English.
Neoplatonism also uses the term waking up for connecting to higher parts. Vedism and other ancient Indian traditions often compare waking from dreaming sleep to attaining the level of mind called “witness consciousness”. We can learn a lot about our potential for changing levels of consciousness by paying attention to how our experience of life changes between deep sleep, REM sleep, and our normal waking state every day.
Just like our physical, emotional and mental bodies the lost higher parts of our total being operate independently but interact with all our other parts. They each deal with a different realm of phenomena. People might consider that only seeing God or getting enlightened are mystical experiences, but there is a vast range of experiences that are due to parts of our being that science and society have overlooked. I have mentioned subtle states of peace, freedom from anxiety, dissatisfaction and seeking, which we might not even recognize at the time. The mystical traditions say that clairvoyance, divination, telepathy, contact with spirits, and many other paranormal experiences are also functions of higher parts of our totality as beings.
It’s necessary to connect these higher parts to explore these capacities. The good news is that we all have these higher parts. The bad news is that we are not in direct control of the connections.
Reconnecting is even harder than learning to wiggle our ears. To connect and educate our higher being parts we need a higher education.
Some people don’t pursue mystical experiences because they believe conscious evolution is too difficult
for them. The Roman Catholic Church teaches, at least usually, that only a very few people chosen by grace can penetrate the divine life, although it is opening up more to mystical praxis. People might believe that their chances of making meaningful progress are too small to be worth the effort. Schools of the Way don’t tell us this. They say everyone has the ability to accomplish something significant for them. It doesn’t require any special ability or qualities beyond what any human being already has, except for a wish to change and the willingness to put out some effort. It’s not always easy, but the challenges of the path to awakening are unavoidable because they are part of our own unique individual nature. They will affect our lives no matter what kind of life we choose because no matter where you go, there you are. On the path to awakening we bravely face these inner challenges because it is the way to eventually become free of them through transformation, to become the people we want to be. Schools assure us that these personal obstacles, which we might find painful and believe are ways in which we are defective or limited, are exactly the challenges we need to evolve; they are gifts.
Sometimes people who have a mystical experience don’t make an effort to get more of them because they believe one experience is enough. They believe they have already been radically changed by them. They believe they remember accurately the wisdom of the experience so they can apply it in their lives. They are sure that they don’t need to pursue another mystical experience. Since they got a mystical experience through circumstances beyond their control they may also believe there is nothing they can do to get more of them. These beliefs do not fit the ancient teachings about connecting to the higher parts of ourselves. Our higher being parts are able to understand the wisdom and can apply it when they are accessible in our daily life because that is their nature. If that higher part is disconnected ending the mystical state then the important insights, feelings, and special abilities also go away. We have only memories left, like photos in a travel album. They are beautiful and inspiring but unable to capture what it was truly like to be there. The advantage of the photos over the actual travelling is that we can easily share them with others, but the photos won’t let anyone sample the local cuisine or talk to the people. You have to be there for that. We can always check how much we have changed by examining our life honestly to see how different our inner experience has become.
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry – higher education
Unlike the famous idiom, this is rocket science. The most complex type of medicine is, according to another idiom, brain surgery, and mystical experience is about transforming and healing deep levels of mind. Fortunately we don’t need to have a detailed knowledge of the anatomy of all our higher bodies to follow a path of awakening, just as we don’t need a detailed knowledge of how our brain works to think, or of our digestive organs to eat. That’s really good, because at this time no one yet has a complete understanding of how our brain works or even of the complex process of food digestion. In cartoons sometimes a character can fly until it remembers it cannot, then it falls. Imagine if people stopped being able to think because they realized they don’t know how their own brain works. If people spent all their time reading everything about how their brain works, whether soundly based or not, they would not have time to use their brain to figure out how to live well. Nor they would not get a deep understanding of how our brain works, because people don’t yet know. Although I have emphasized the importance of spiritual anatomy, the same is true for mystics. Spending too much time studying esoteric metaphysics can be a detraction from the business of self-transformation. According to mystical teachings a deep understanding of spiritual anatomy is not possible until we have already begun to reconnect to the totality of our being because the higher planes are very different from the ones we know.
The Neoplatonists called one of our higher parts Nous, transcendental intellect. This is the part able to apprehend mystical truths. Sometimes Buddhists call such a part bodhicitta, awakened mind. These kinds of parts have also been called by many other terms including the higher thinking center and the higher mental body. Higher knowledge can be communicated from one person’s higher center to another’s but obviously not until we have at least begun the process of our reconnecting. This transfer of insight is one meaning of the ancient Mystery School term initiation. In Tibetan Buddhism it is called
wisdom empowerment. It is called “mind to mind transmission” in Zen Buddhism.
Similarly to higher thoughts, transcendental emotions like profound peace, transcendental contentment, true unconditional love, compassion, awe at the majesty of the creation, or longing for the divine are products of a higher emotional center. The activation of our higher emotional center is aided by interacting with and relating to others who have begun that process already. Our centers resonate to those of other people like tuning forks. This happens in a mystical school.
We also get conventional information in a mystical school. We don’t need to know our brain anatomy to think but as we are growing up we are taught a lot of things that help us to think better. We learn our native language from our parents, which we use to think. They also teach us what things are good for us to eat so our bodies and brains are healthy. As we get older we may follow the advice of nutritional experts on a healthy diet. People learn reading, math, logical thinking, critical thinking, and the scientific method in school, all of which increase the power of our minds. If we want to have very healthy bodies, we get a physical trainer and do special exercises with special equipment, or learn advanced types of movement like martial arts, dance, or sports. Getting expert training can greatly increase our physical abilities. If we are having emotional problems, or just want to be happier, we may seek the help of a therapist. In gaining these higher levels of functionality whether physically, emotionally or mentally we greatly benefit from training by expert teachers. Even if we can make some meaningful progress on our own we know we will make much faster progress and reach a higher level of functionality with an expert guide. If we can find one we like and trust.
Showing people how to work to reconnect to their own being and how to nurture and train their higher being parts is one of the purposes of a mystical school. Each tradition originated in a different culture, a different part of the world, and a different time in history. It has its own style, its own methods, and its own strategy of teaching. It also uses its own terminology. All of this can make different schools seem like they are teaching something different, but since the core process is a natural one based on our inherent nature as beings, all paths, to the degree they are true and complete, have to basically accomplish the same thing: sequentially re-connect us to the lost parts of our totality as beings and help the components of our totality as beings to heal, mature and learn.
That is why someone who has had some mystical experiences and wants to have more or deeper, or has an intuition they are real and valuable, or is even simply curious and wishes to investigate, would be wise to seek out a school of awakening that they trust and enjoy. If a school has real knowledge of our higher being-parts and how to re-activate them this should become clear after a short time. Because mainstream institutions ignore large parts of our experiential reality, they leave a large vacuum for people who have any limited knowledge of them to impress new recruits. It’s important to keep our eyes open and stay aware, for a school can have some impressive knowledge of higher things but still be misdirected or missing important parts of the picture. You should be able to leave a school easily at any time you decide or something is wrong. You should not be unduly pressured to stay. Some schools claim to be the only correct and complete path, the one true way. Since we are talking about developing an inherent potential already within us, that all people have, how could anyone claim to have a monopoly on how to realize it? It would be like claiming to be the only farmer that can grow tomatoes. How could anyone know that they have the only complete mystical school? They would have to have thoroughly checked out thousands of other schools in person, which takes a fair bit of time and resources. I would
suggest caution around any school that makes such claims which are likely to be motivated by egotism and manipulation. It is less suspicious when schools claim that they are the fastest way, or that there is no better way. We often know the fastest, safest or cheapest way to get from one place to another. The most credible claim a school can make, though, is that it works if everything goes well. Any way that works for you is the best way. Respect, admiration and affection for evolved mystics is natural, but the aim of students in a school is not just to make a big deal out of anyone. It is to connect up their higher being faculties.
Whether or not any decent schools of enlightenment exist today we can only find out by looking for them and trying them out. We have religious freedom so we don’t have to worry about being burned at the stake. Every human culture has a mystical heritage. We are no longer as a society mentally imprisoned by our own racism and cultural bigotry. Whatever the culture of our parents we can appreciate what other cultures have to offer. We are lucky that with our contemporary global culture, rapid travel and cheap communication we have access to thousands of schools from all over the world. We are experiencing a major renaissance of spiritual teaching in Western culture similar to the one that happened about 1800 years ago in the heyday of the Roman Empire, or during the prosperous rise of the unifying Magadha Empire in India some 700 years earlier. The more mystical experiences we gather as we progress, the more we will be able to identify who really knows what they are talking about.
I’m sure there is more to say about taking mystical experience seriously but I don’t know what it is. Any of the named authors and artists are worth checking out if you happen to be interested. Questions or comments on this article are welcome.