If you are truly interested in the mysteries of life, you want to learn about yourself and the world, sooner or later you’ll stumble upon mysticism. Whether this subject will grab your attention, or not, is part of life’s mysteries too.
Mysticism can be described as becoming one with God or the Absolute and my way of experiencing it was at the end of a long, painful journey that brought me from London, to Brazil and India, all the way to Koh Phangan.
My first mystical experience manifested in Dharamsala, North India, at the end of a 1 week Tantric Yoga retreat, the culmination of months of searching for answers, seeking healing and inner peace.
Streams of red energy, hot wind, ecstatic sensations, hitting exactly the points on my body where chakras were located, totally enveloped me for an entire night.
Years later, after much reading, learning, meditating and further experiencing, I feel I refined an understanding of mysticism I will try to articulate here.
There are different modes of inquiry, methodologies to access knowledge:
• Western science and the scientific method which mostly is used to understand the physical world.
• Philosophy, the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Ethics and morality, or how we should be living life with each other, is under this realm and clearly beyond the scope of Western science.
• Psychology is the attempt to understand the mind and human behaviour as individuals and carries elements of science and philosophy. When psychology expands its remit to studing groups, it touches other disciplines like sociology and anthropology. Many psychologists, famously including Carl Jung, were also studying mythology and mysticism as part of their inquiry.
• Mysticism contains a set of practices focused on the subjective, empiric, experiential reality that transcends the physical (metaphysical) and, to a certain extent, transcends the mind too. It has to do with the spiritual or soul element of humans and the world at large.
The application of this ancient knowledge, which includes certain tools and techniques, has been traditionally somewhat regulated by religions and other organisations and kept for a minority of initiates.
Practices that are becoming more commonly understood and accepted include meditation and internal energy work (Tai chi, Qigong, some Tantric Yoga techniques, Reiki etc.).
These allow the expert individual to reach states of consciousness that transcends the usual or mundane and allow feelings of deep relaxation, detachment from thoughts, well-being and belonging, up to peak experiences of connection and fusion with the “whole”.
You will not find evidence for, or endorsement of, mysticism in the realm of Western science and certainly not in generalised mainstream culture. Science is materialistic, largely reductionist and limited to the “objective” reality.
I understand the need of human beings and society for absolute truths. It seems to be useful to draw some generally accepted conclusions about the world and ourselves in it. All cultures and, crucially, our individual psychologies are based on some fundamental axioms. This might be good for mental health and day to day practical functioning.
The scientific interpretation of objective reality continuously changes and evolves though. Elements of philosophy, hypothesis and suppositions need to be necessarily incorporated in much scientific speculation. There is plenty of historical evidence of scientific theories changing assumptions and conclusions, including in a hard science like physics.
As much as science serves us well in many realms of life, it is limited and carries many problems, methodologically but also in terms of economic and political influence or even manipulation, not dissimilarly to some of the issues manifested in institutionalised religions.
This is why we can’t limit ourselves to materialism and pragmatism and the study of science, if we are truly interested in learning about ourselves and the world we inhabit.
We must delve into our personal awareness, our inner state of consciousness, we need mysticism and mystical practices, if we truly want to explore reality.
According to William James, mystical experience can be characterised as having the following properties:
• Ineffability. The mystical experience “defies expression, that no adequate report of its content can be given in words”.
• Noetic quality. Mystics stress that their experiences give them “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” James referred to this as the “noetic” (or intellectual) “quality” of the mystical.
• Transiency. James notes that most mystical experiences have a short occurrence, but their effect persists.
• Passivity. According to James, mystics come to their peak experience not as active seekers, but as passive recipients
If you are open to it and to a certain extent ready for it, you might feel your body and experience yourself in a new and rather amazing way. You won’t need any piece of paper describing anything anymore, you’ll just know.
As part of my own journey of discovery, I had various experiences with techniques that elevate and prepare the individual for the gift of grace or revelation, which is given and not obtained. This means the practice or tools bring you up to a certain point when you need to let go, for the individual ego to temporarily disappear.
This eventually might trigger feelings of ecstasy, wholeness and connection. I am familiar with energy channelling, rebirthing breathwork, Tantra transfiguration. I practise daily with meditation and achieve detachment, joy and pleasure, inspiration and creativity through it.
If you experience this, you might naturally be prone to acquire further training and go as far as incorporating meditation, certain types of breathwork and practices of transcendence in your day to day life. This is common for spiritual practitioners and seekers across the world and certainly on Koh Phangan where I live.
The reality that much of what we are, feel and do in this experience we call life, is mysterious and uncertain, is a source of fear for most and thus negated. My personal attitude is one of seeking and searching, with an open mind and an open heart, which requires a certain courage or predisposition but, theoretically, it is open to everyone.
“Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own” said John Ruskin.
And from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge” (Inf. 26.118-20)
The goal of Yoga and other Eastern philosophy, the connection and union with the higher self or divine, a portal to the soul, mysticism is the temporary transcendence of our limited life form, a glimpse at the source of the ultimate truth.