Beyond Mysticism

BEYOND MYSTICISM

by

James R. Horne

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Horne, James R., 1931-

Beyond mysticism

(SR supplements ; 6)

Includes index.

ISBN 0-919812-08-2 pa.

1. Mysticism.     I. Title.     II. Series.

B828.H67     149’.3     C78-001328-X

© 1978 Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses/ Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion

Preface

Some books make revelations about their authors, and I am reconciled to the prospect that this will be one of them. It is a product of my dual involvement in the intellectual world of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and in the devotional community of the Church, in several Anglican parishes. I have had wonderful experiences in both places, and am indebted to many people whose commitment and integrity, as they lived in one environment or the other, was an inspiration to me. Above all, I want to thank several people who gave me special kinds of help. As it happens, (perhaps not by accident), everyone in that group shares in my attempt to live in both environments, reconciling the world of reason with the community of faith.

My gratitude, therefore, goes to the following people: Nawal Sayegh and Gary Colwell, two of my students who encouraged me during a critical period; Paul Seligman, who gave me wise advice for many years; Terence Penelhum, who several times spoke the right words to me at the right moment; Grace Logan, who did a magnificent job as my teacher and adviser at the computer. Finally, Jean Home, pursuing her own scholarship, was a shining example to me and left me plenty of time alone for writing during a sabbatical leave generously granted by the University of Waterloo. .

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities Research Council of Canada, using funds provided by the Canada Council. Its publication has been sponsored by the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion. Chapter III is a greatly expanded version of my article, How to Describe Mystical Experiences, published in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 6/3 (1976-7), pp. 279-84, and what is reproduced appears by permission of the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion. Much of Chapter V originally appeared as Which Mystic Has the Revelation? Religious Studies 11, (1975), pp. 283-90, and a section of Chapter VI is condensed from Do Mystics Perceive Themselves? Religious Studies 13, (1977), pp. 327-33. Material from these two articles is reproduced by permission of the Editor and the Cambridge University Press.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter I Can We Define Mysticism?

Chapter II Are There Types of Mysticism?

Chapter III Can We Describe Mystical Experiences?

Chapter IV Is Mysticism Rational?

Chapter V Are Some Mystics More Reliable Than Others?

Chapter VI What is the Meaning of Mystical Experience?

Index

Introduction

There are various ways of writing about this subject. You can simply describe your mystical experiences, telling about the visions you saw and the feelings you had; you can tell others how to have the experience and realize its benefits; or, finally, you can try to explain what it means. Writers on mysticism, such varying types as St. Teresa, George Fox, Carlos Castaneda, William James, James Leuba, and W.T. Stace, often mix the three approaches together, since you can hardly just describe mysticism, or just tell how to engage in it, without giving your readers some idea of what you think it is and what you think it means. Still, each writer does seem to be concerned with it primarily in one way. Carlos Castaneda is known for his descriptions. Writers of devotional manuals tell how to live the mystical life, and theologians and philosophers try to assess its meaning.

The title of this book, Beyond Mysticism, is meant to indicate that as a philosopher writing about mysticism I am concerned with meaning and have adopted a particular interpretation of mysticism, for reasons which are stated in Chapters III and IV. I believe that mysticism is, literally, a psychological process which occurs with varying degrees of intensity in everyone’s life. We go through it, and we go beyond it, changed by the experience as we face the rest of life. That is one meaning of the word beyond in the title. Beyond also refers to my intention to do more than describe mystical experiences and tell how to enter into them. As a philosopher, I want to go beyond mysticism and discuss some philosophic questions it raises, except that you have to realize that when philosophers say that they are going beyond a subject they really mean that they are backing up and starting again before it. They have decided that before they talk about it any more they will have to find the answers to some preliminary questions. If you can answer these basic questions, they always say, then you will really be able to go ahead into the study of the subject itself.

Of course, that isn’t the way things work in real life. When I’m speaking as a philosopher, I may say that I have to settle some fundamental problems about mysticism before I can say anything else about it, but the real fact is that I have been talking about it for years. I began as a somewhat mystical person myself, fascinated by this part of religious experience, and I may even have had some mild mystical experiences, (which, I have learned, is not in the least unusual) . As a result, I have been motivated to loiter in libraries and near altars, finding out what the mystics said, what others have said about them, and what some of them wrote to explain themselves.

I have found that the mystics are a fascinating and diverse lot, and that many of them, through the decades and centuries, have been very thoughtful and have adopted consistent attitudes toward life, and recognizable methods for dealing with their problems. However, such attitudes and methods, sound as they may have been, appear to have grown up naturally out of the life experience of the mystics, and to have existed as unquestioned beliefs underlying their thought, rather than as reasoned conclusions about mysticism and its study. Now, the presence of unquestioned assumptions is always both a worry and a challenge to a philosopher, so, while the mystic in me accepts their writings with gratitude and delight, the philosopher in me demands that some important preliminary questions be answered. In other words, a philosophic activity beyond mysticism beckons. I cannot pretend to deal with all the important preliminary questions, but I can mention six that are important, and I can give reasons for my answers to them. Here are the questions:

(1) Can we define mysticism?

(2) Are there types of mysticism?

(3) Can we describe mystical experiences?

(4) Is mysticism rational?

(5) Are some mystics more reliable than others?

(6) What is the meaning of mystical experience?

I shall deal with these questions in the order given, in six chapters, although my discussion of a given question cannot always be kept separate from that of others. For example, I find that I cannot settle the question of mysticism’s definition without considering the types of mysticism, and this means that question (1) is not answered until the end of Chapter II. In general, though, my answers to the earlier questions pave the way for discussions of later ones, and I hope that you will find the progression from the rather strict analysis in the earlier chapters to the more speculative conclusions of the later ones very natural. If I have it right, the reader will agree with what I say in the early chapters, but may, somewhere toward the end, find that his intuitions force him to part company with me from there on. That possibility is inherent in discussions of this highly individual experience and my hope must be that I will at least succeed in identifying what it is we are disagreeing about, and what reasons we might have for taking our various stands.

A final introductory point. Although this book is focused on preliminary problems connected with achieving clarity in discussions of mysticism, happily it cannot avoid just plain talking about mysticism. No one can deplore that, since that is what we want to do anyway. The philosopher’s aim is just to make all the talk more understandable.

Chapter I

Can We Define Mysticism?

Anyone who takes up a book with the word mysticism in its title probably already knows the names and life-stories of a few mystics, and believes that he knows what mysticism is. It is only when he tries to define it more exactly that he discovers that there is some question about the matter, and that mysticism can elude him as he tries to pin it down. If he says, for example, that mystics are religious people, he will soon realize that there are mystics who are not religious, and that his definition is too narrow. If he says that mystics are people who see visions, he will in time think of people who see visions but are not mystics, and realize that his definition is too broad. Similar problems arise with the realization that mysticism is not always a serious affair, and that for some people mystical experiences have been brief and casual episodes. When you read the various books that have come out on this subject in recent years you can only conclude that the experience occurs in a bewildering variety of forms, which makes it both fascinating to study and hard to define.

The first strategy that occurs to us when we find that we cannot immediately define something like this is to give examples of it. We feel that if we cannot define it we at least know it when we see it. Also, there have been some reports that were more generally recognized as mystical, than others, and they tend to be the examples used. A few of them have even achieved a certain fame. For example, the following experience has always been recognized as mystical, and has been used as a model by many writers on the subject. The writer of this account refers to himself as he instead of I.

All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next, he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Branmic splendour which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving henceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven.¹

This was the experience of Richard Maurice Bucke, (1837-1901), a Canadian psychiatrist whose ideas and character were so totally transformed by it that he acquired the power to follow three careers at once, with outstanding results in each. He was a pioneer in modernizing the treatment of the insane, a scholar of comparative mysticism, and an editor and biographer of Walt Whitman. For him, the mystical experience was a matter of ultimate seriousness, and it redirected the course of his life. For others, however it may not be so serious, and may have no long-term effects. Of course, such non-serious experiences are not usually recorded for posterity, and one is likely to hear about them only as casual anecdotes told by friends. However, one example is in print, mentioned by R.C. Zaehner, because he wanted to establish that not all mystical experiences have the same importance. When he read that Aldous Huxley, after taking a psychedelic drug, reported an experience of being a Not-self in the Not-self which was a chair, and that Huxley thought that this was a profound mystical experience, he was moved to report that he had once had a very similar experience as a result of reading poetry. He felt that it was not significant:

I know now that it was a case of what is usually called a ’natural mystical experience’ which may occur to anyone, whatever his religious faith or lack of it and whatever moral, immoral, or amoral life he may be leading at the time. . . . The experience was there in its own right, and I had no desire to explain it.²

He found the results of taking mescalin equally unimpressive:

In Huxley’s terminology ’self-transcendence’ of a sort did take place, but transcendence into a world of farcical meaninglessness. All things were one in the sense that they were all, at the height of my manic state, equally funny: the quality of ’funniness’ and incongruity had swallowed up all others.³

In these cases Zaehner seems simply to have said to himself, How odd! and then to have continued with his more rational, everyday activities. The experiences were strange interruptions, but nothing more. We may well wonder how often such things happen, and how many others have had such changes of consciousness, been unable to connect them with the rest of their experience, and so eventually have left them unrecorded and forgotten. It seems quite possible that the events which William James called rudimentary mystical experiences are very common. As he put it:

Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.⁴

Most of us have had the kind of moments James mentions, and we know what he means in associating them with mystical experience. Yet, impressive as they might be, they are also casual, especially in the sense of being spontaneous. It appears that they just occur one day, without any preparation. In fact, that seems to be true of most of the cases mentioned so far. Bucke’s experience, for example, had a profound effect on him, but it came as a surprise, without any conscious preparation on his part. The same seems to be true of Zaehner’s early experience, and it is obvious that there is no systematic preparation for the insights obtained while reading poetry. You may have them immediately, or after years of study, or not at all.

But not all mysticism is so spontaneous. We know that the approach to the experience can be systematic, and that there are systems of meditation and of moral and even physical discipline that are supposed to lead to it. The most famous of them are found in Yoga and Zen, but something of system can be found even in religious accounts of Christians, where the writers would be predisposed to say that the experience cannot be obtained, but is a gift of God. But such expressions are not the only ones used in theistic religions. This is apparent in most of the writings of their mystics. Here, for example, is what Evelyn Underhill says, summarizing her knowledge of many Christian reports:

We said, at the beginning of this discussion, that mysticism was the art of union with Reality: that it was, above all else, a Science of Love. Hence, the condition to which it looks forward and towards which the soul of the contemplative has been stretching out, is a condition of being, not seeing. As the bodily senses have been produced under pressure of man’s physical environment, and their true aim is not the enhancement of his pleasure or his knowledge, but a perfecting of his adjustment to those aspects of the natural world which concern him—so the use and meaning of the spiritual senses are strictly practical too. These, when developed by a suitable training, reveal to man a certain measure of Reality: that he may react to it, learn to live in, with, and for it; growing and stretching into more perfect harmony with the Eternal Order, until at last, like the blessed ones of Dante’s vision, the clearness of his flame responds to the unspeakable radiance of the Enkindling Light.⁵

There is a great deal to this passage, and even with its peculiar symbolic language it might very easily be studied as a kind of concentrated introduction to the whole subject of mysticism. It was, of course, written by one of the great scholars of the subject. I have quoted it because it emphasizes and pictures something we might call training, and pictures mysticism as an art and science, within a very deliberate development of growing and stretching. It describes an approach which is far from random or spontaneous. So mysticism is obviously an experience which is approached by at least two distinguishable routes, one of them characterized by the spontaneity found in experiences like Bucke’s, and the