Ordinary Mysticism

Problems with ‘mysticism’ as a category

‘Mysticism’ is a notoriously vague term.  I would like to call your attention to a particular bait-and-switch way that it is used. 

On one hand, it is used as a catch all for nearly all forms of religious experience.

On the other, it is also used to describe a narrower set of religious experiences – those of union with the transcendent or non-duality.  This ‘union’ often accompanies a denial of the self, sometimes to the point of the total annihilation of the self, or denying that there was a self to begin with.

The latter is a real and valid strand of mysticism.  The bait and switch is when the broad definition is given and then swapped for the narrow definition.

Richard Rohr does this bait and switch here:

Notice how “experiential” imports the concept of non-duality in a way that is treated as self-evident.

The unitive definition has crept its way into research about the psychology of religion also:

Taken from the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire

This causes a lot of unnecessary confusion. It’s fine to talk about or advocate for annihilatory, non-dual, and self-effacing mysticism.  But there are also many non-unitive, non-dissolutory religious experiences which leave the course of an individual life (or even a whole culture or civilization) profoundly changed.  These other forms are arbitrarily and unfairly passed over.

A model of mystic attainment that posits an attainable, perfected state in this lifetime can fuel grandiosity: the belief that if we could only attain this state, we would finally be special and important saints.

There are other common, arbitrary exclusions from the category of ‘mysticism’ such as an emphasis of the contemplative over the ecstatic and the solitary over the communal.

Why the bait and switch?

I don’t think the people engaging in the bait and switch are always doing it consciously and nefariously.  But it does seem to align with certain ideo-theological agendas and market incentives.

One of them is a belief that unitive mysticism is more suitable to the demands of ecumenism: that it is most identifiable and generalizable across cultural and religious boundaries.  One problem with this is that there are other forms of mystical experience that also replicate across very different cultural circumstances.  For example, both Paul and Ashoka experience repentance.

Another is premium mediocre marketing:  creating something that appears exclusive while not excluding anybody.  Mysticism is the province of great and temporally removed saints while also being the subject of Oprah club books.  It is theoretically accessible to anyone but doesn’t have the uncomfortably plebeian associations of charismatic fundamentalist churches or addicts finding God in prison.

Revelations less valued

I think that there is a more common religious experience than unitive mysticism.  It consists of a sudden intrusion of the sense of the transcendent, often followed by a desire for a total re-orientation of life. 

It is typically (although not always) characterized by a sudden religious conversion.  But this doesn’t always appear to be the case.  There are certainly examples these kinds of experiences that don’t seem to result in conversion to any particular religion at all, as in the case of this one taken from the life of R Buckminster Fuller:

In 1927, at age 32, Fuller lost his job as president of Stockade. The Fuller family had no savings, and the birth of their daughter Allegra in 1927 added to the financial challenges. Fuller drank heavily and reflected upon the solution to his family's struggles on long walks around Chicago. During the autumn of 1927, Fuller contemplated suicide by drowning in Lake Michigan, so that his family could benefit from a life insurance payment.

Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident which would provide direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared:

From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.

Fuller stated that this experience led to a profound re-examination of his life. He ultimately chose to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity".

Speaking to audiences later in life, Fuller would frequently recount the story of his Lake Michigan experience, and its transformative impact on his life.

They seem to demand a full existential re-orientation in how we live, often so much so that they divide our lives into a before and after.

I believe that these powerful, extraordinary experiences are not ends in themselves.  The importance of the experience is that it drives us to live differently.

The devaluation of this kind of mysticism in favor of the unitive, non-dual, or even annihilatory kind often associated with obscures a different aim of spiritual practice: not the dissolution of the ego, but an escape from egotism.

Egotism and Ego

“Did they get you to trade a walk on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?”

Many of us struggle to maintain the illusion that we are the main characters of our narrative - the most important people in the world.  We might do great things, one day.  We might finally achieve something that lets everyone know how special and important we are.  We treat our own failures generously and those of others harshly.

I am tempted to assign the word ‘narcissism’ to this phenomenon.  However, this word has some clinical baggage.  I suspect that ‘narcissism’ as a personality disorder is just a particularly extreme case of something that is present in most, if not all of us.  l’ll use a less loaded label: egotism.

Intellectually we know that this view of ourselves is bullshit. To say it out loud might invite sneering accusations of being a snowflake.  But it doesn’t occur at the level of the intellect.  It is not a proposition we reason ourselves into or out of.  It occurs at the more fundamental level of consciousness that precedes reason. 

This is why it requires something stronger than reason to dislodge.  A shattering personal loss, a brush with death, a dedicated or intense spiritual practice, psychedelics, or spontaneous mystical experience can all be that something.

These things can inspire a terror akin to the terror of death.  But this isn’t an annihilatory death where the sense of a continuous self permanently ceases.  It is not annihilation, but a refining fire in which our vanities and pretensions are burned away.

Living out the consequences of this rebirth is the hard part.  The enemy, properly understood, is not “ego” in the sense of a discrete, continuous self that must be annihilated while still alive.  The goal is not to walk around in a depersonalized state.  The goal is to rid ourselves of a certain conceit. 

But the project of escaping this conceit is as radical as any quest for some continual, numinous state of spiritual enlightenment, even if the results do not seem so otherworldly.

We ourselves would be better off without this conceit.  We could stop playing the lead role in the tiny prison of our own self-important narratives and instead take up a bit parts in a vast and mysterious world.  The desire to be special or attain glory is a positional good.  It is inherently zero-sum.  Stop trying to be special and you can leave the hardscrabble, zero-sum world behind. 

You cannot be heroic to the world while being the hero of your own narrative.  The way out of this trap is to die before you die.

Hopes of achieving an irrevocable, spiritual end state in this life – union, theosis, or enlightenment – are as likely as anything to be the products of a desire for personal aggrandizement.  “If only I could become a saint – my life would have meaning.”  It is an attempt to purify one’s motivations that itself springs from corrupt motivations.

Liberation – Iroh and Zuko

The following section assumes you’ve seen and are familiar with the animated children’s television series Avatar: the Last Airbender (ATLA).  It contains spoilers.  If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and watch it now (the original animated series, NOT the live action movie or live action Netflix series).

Uncle Iroh is not the main character of ATLA.  He is a supporting character (albeit an indispensable one), and he accepts this role cheerfully.

Iroh is not an ascetic; he delights in tea, food, music and flirtation.  But he can also give these things up when called upon to do so.  Despite being a formidable warrior, he has not pretensions of elitism or specialness.  He takes the time to chat and fraternize with a wayward mugger.  He is a war hero and former crown prince who prefers singing and playing games with the ordinary members of the crew.

None of this stops him from stepping into a role as warrior and liberator when the circumstances demand it.  This is key: it is the circumstances that demand it, not his own self-image.

He is not trying to be the main character.  He is not self-centred in the sense that he does not see himself as the center of what is going on around him.  This makes him more effective at showing up and providing whatever it is that his circumstances demand of him.  It also makes him more capable of enjoying life and of appreciating the small kindnesses people share with each other amidst the hardships of the Fire Nation’s war.

We learn that he was once the main character of a much darker story, one which cost him dearly.  He abandoned his role in that story and is better off for having done so.

His lack of royal entitlement allows him to adapt to the life of a fugitive, beggar and refugee more easily than his nephew Zuko.  Zuko is trapped in a narrow and confining story about himself: one about the restoration of his honor. 

Zuko’s self narrative is gradually and insidiously corroded by, among other things, the realization of the effect that his nation’s war has had on ordinary people all around him.  He breaks out of it when he realizes – slowly and painfully – that it was never about him.

Demons in Hell

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” - Simone Weil

“Aggrieved narcissist” describes many mass shooters.  Trapped in their own self-important narratives, they can wantonly destroy the lives of total strangers and still see themselves as victim of the world’s greatest injustices.  Those dead, wounded and grieving people were simply props to the shooters’ story.

When you are at the center of your own narrative about the world, the inevitable counter-evidence that the world throws at you is an assault, an existential threat that must be overcome by any means necessary.  Small ordinary setbacks provoke disproportionate pain and rage.

At its extreme, you can become a demonic being: simultaneously tortured and evil.  The torture is the way your own self importance magnifies every setback, every contra-indication to your own grandiosity, as some kind of burning cosmic injustice.  The evil is that you do not care what you inflict on others; they cannot have any value in and of themselves, only as props to your story.

Elliott Rodger is considered the ur-incel shooter, but I do not think his actions are best understood in terms of sexlessness or ideology.  They were an expression of extreme, malignant narcissism.  Elliott Rodger gave himself fully over to the demonic.

In his manifesto, he shares his disappointed rage at not winning the lottery after buying a ticket - expecting this will make him more sympathetic to the reader.  He sees himself as the main character, someone who is owed something by the world.  He demands to be the center of the universe, and when he receives even very mild feedback informing him that he is not, it sends him into a spiral of rage.

My heart was beating rapidly as I loaded up the webpage to the Megamillions website. What I saw crushed all of my hope completely. My whole body shivered with horrific agony. I didn’t win. Three people won that jackpot, and it was split between them. But none of those three people were me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was certain I would be the winner. It was destiny… fate. But no, the world continued to give me no justice or salvation whatsoever.

"My Twisted World” - Elliott Rodger

The original, primordial sin, the one that predates the Edenic fall, was pride: an unwillingness to accept one’s role in a larger creation, the belief that one knows better than God, that one is more important than whatever designated role one has received.

Possessed by egotism, the conceit of the main character, we choose to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven.  We lash out at a world that has spurned us. The result of this is not some proud, noble Miltonian Satan but the sad pathetic narcissism of an Elliott Rodger.

Spiritual Grandiosity

The concept of enlightenment (here used as a catch all for different forms of spiritual perfection) feeds into the dynamic of narcissism.  It tells us that if we ourselves were to attain some rare state encountered by a spiritual elite in history, we might finally satisfy (and thus put an end to) our own cravings for status, glory, and a mission at the center of it all.

It is better if we reject and give up on the conceit that we might be saints.  The point is not that we personally might achieve some kind of completeness as people who are fully healed of all of our scars and vices, ready to take our place as God’s golden children in the sweep of human history, but rather that there is a wide, vast and beautiful world that we can participate in. 

We get access to this world, a world transformed into something more beautiful and more meaningful, insofar as we abandon conceits about our own perfection and personal importance – and also that terrible demonic lure, the belief in our own perfectability.

Some reading this might think I am calling for an abandonment of the cultivation of virtue - that I have succumbed to nihilism.  The point is not that we should not better ourselves, the point is that the reward isn’t what we think it is.

The reward is not that we get to become special and important – the reward is getting to see the world with renewed eyes.