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MYSTICISM
Definitions of mysticism and mystical experience
Differences between mysticism and
similar phenomena
To define is to limit, and no single definition will cover every aspect of mysticism. Some have
objected to the word itself and believed that "enlightenment" or "illumination" might be better. Though
they meet, mysticism has to be distinguished from prophetic religions as well as from shamanism (a belief system built around
psychic transformations). Working through chosen individuals--not necessarily saints and chosen for no other reason than God's
will--prophetic religions emphasize action to a far greater extent than most forms of mysticism, with its penchant for inwardness
and the beyond. Though in ecstasy the barriers seem to disappear, in prophetism God and man are rarely identified. Shamanism,
a technique of ecstasy generally found in Siberia and Central Asia but with parallels in primitive society, provides a sort
of correspondence with the purgative stage of mysticism (in which physical needs are negated). The closeness to paranormal
(or supernatural) phenomena seems more pronounced, however, in shamanism. Both the shaman and the mystic, as communicants
with a world beyond normal experience, reveal an identity of goal, if not of practice and content.
Basic patterns
Paradigmatic pronouncements in regard to mysticism pose problems of their own. The classic Indian formula--"that
thou art," tat tvam asi (Chandogya Upanisad, 6.9)--is hedged in with the profoundest ambiguity. The difficulty reappears
in the thought of the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckehart, who had the church raising questions for such unguarded
statements as "The knower and the known are one. God and I, we are one in knowledge" and "There is no distinction
between us."
Mysticism may be defined as the belief in a third kind of knowledge, the other two being sense
knowledge and knowledge by inference. Adolf Lasson has written:
The essence of Mysticism is the assertion of an intuition
which transcends the temporal categories of the understanding. . . . Rationalism cannot conduct us to the essence of things;
we therefore need intellectual vision.
This same view was held by the 3rd-century-AD Greek philosopher Plotinus.
But the pattern misses the other dominant quality of mystical experience--love, or union through love. The medieval, theistic
view of mysticism (as of religious life) was that it was "a stretching out of the soul into God through the urge of love,
an experimental knowledge of God through unifying love." Its other name was joy, and the endeavour of the mystic to grasp
the divine essence or ultimate reality helped him to enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with the highest. This was
considered both a science and an art. As a science (i.e., intuitive knowledge, or the "science of ultimates"), mysticism
is viewed as being able to help in "the overcoming of creatureliness," and also as being able to maintain "the
tendency to stress up to an extreme and exaggerated point the non-rational aspect of religion."
Reality, a kingdom
of values, is viewed not as a faceless infinite, an impersonal something or somewhat. If not an ego, it is a being, and most
mystics would call it God. Mysticism arises when man tries to bring the urge toward a communion with God--a "Being conceived
as the supreme and ultimate reality," according to the British scholar William Ralph Inge--toward a higher consciousness
and being in relation with the other contents of his mind and total personality, when he tries to realize the presence of
the living God in the soul and in nature or, more generally, in the attempt to realize (in thought and feeling) the immanence
of the temporal in the eternal. A 19th-century scholar, Otto Pfleiderer, indicated that religious mysticism is "the immediate
feeling of unity of the self with God; it is nothing, therefore, but the fundamental feeling of religion, the religious life
at its very heart and centre." Against such exclusive concentration the British writer Richard Nettleship suggests a
corrective element, that of wholeness and symbolism. "Mysticism is the consciousness that everything that we experience
is an element, and only an element, in fact, i.e. that in being what it is, it is symbolic of something else. Author Unknown
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