Within the study of world mysticism, there is debate over what bounds to put around the topic. What do we mean by “mystical” experience? What experiences count, or don’t count?
The content on this site mostly revolves around the form of contemplative experience typically meant by the Christian term contemplation. Contemplation, in the Christian context, refers to an experience of Absolute or Pure Consciousness, most often interpreted as “Union with God.” It is “beyond thought” – a place in which the self disappears into Being, into God.
St. Theresa describes it as “water in water,” or light which enters a room from different windows and becomes one.
St. John of the Cross calls it “abiding in a pure and simple light” – beyond image and form.
It seems to me that this experience not only exists within each contemplative tradition, but also that what we might call Unitive Consciousness is the apex of the journey. Its ongoing experience is that which ultimately and fully transforms a soul.
Another class of experience which often falls within the bounds of world mysticism we might classify as the experience of “God as the Ground of the world.” In his Mysticism and Philosophy, W. T. Stace contrasts introvertive mysticism (i.e. Unitive Consciousness in the Ground of the soul) with extrovertive mysticism (an experience of the Unity and Beauty of all things in the world, United in God so to speak).
Examples of this extroverted mysticism (in various degrees) might be a sudden intuitive flash while in nature, the Zen experience of Satori, or something along the lines of Aldous Huxley’s description of his mescalin experience in The Doors of Perception; the temporary and sometimes unexpected experience of the sacredness and oneness of all things.
I tend to see introvertive experience – Pure Consciousness in the Ground of the Soul – as somehow more fundamental and agree with Stace when he says:
“…it looks as if the extrovertive mysticism were a sort of incomplete version of the completeness realized in the introvertive kind.”
But extrovertive forms of mystical experience also exist, and are often described as overwhelmingly powerful. In our modern Western culture, the term “mysticism” typically evokes ideas related to various forms of extrovertive mysticism.
F. C. Happold, in his Mysticism, discusses as follows:
“Thus our study is concerned with a form of experience and a type of consciousness, which can not only be approached from different angles but also be given different interpretations. We can put aside immediately all those false types of so-called mysticism such as spiritualism, occultism, and the like, which have been referred to above. We may also dismiss as inadequate and misleading such phrases as ‘All religion is mystical.’ Mystical experience may take more than one form. It is, however, a quite different and recognizable form of experience. Not need we concern ourselves with visions and states of ecstasy. Accounts of them are found in the writings of contemplatives; they are, however, usually regarded with some suspicion and are in no way an essential element in mystical experience. Nor shall we regard all psychical experience as necessarily mystical…
We shall, however, regard as falling within the scope of our study a range of experience, which we shall maintain may rightly be called mystical, which extends far beyond that advanced and rare state which medieval writers call Contemplation. While few attain to that high state of mystical experience when it becomes a distinct form of consciousness, there is a wide range of spiritual and aesthetic experience which, I would maintain, is of the same character and proceeds from the same source. A man may be a mystic who is not, and never could be, a contemplative. There come to many the sudden moments of intuitive perception, elusive, fading quickly, but of deep significance, illuminations which they feel reveal to them new facets of reality. Perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime may come an experience more profound, of the sort which came to Warner Allen, and which he described in The Timeless Moment, or to Blaise Pascal, which he recorded on the scrap of paper found sewn up in his doublet after his death:
From about half past ten in the evening to
about half an hour after midnight.
Fire.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,
Not the God of philosophers and scholars.
Absolute Certainty: Beyond Reason. Joy. Peace.
Forgetfulness of the world and everything but God.
The world has not known thee, but I have known thee.
Joy! joy! joy! tears of joy!
Such experiences, when they happen to a man, revolutionize his outlook, often change his life. He may carry on with his normal occupation as before. To his friends and acquaintances he may seem to be the same as he always was. But in himself he is changed. He feels that he has received a pure, direct vision of truth. Nothing can be the same again. These may not call themselves mystics, but in a lesser degree they have known something that the true contemplative knows in a more intense and continuous form. Their contact is with the same Reality as his.”
And so the comparison between introvertive and extrovertive experience has become one way of classifying forms of mystical experience within the field.
It is debated whether or not traditional visionary experiences (or perhaps visionary experiences achieved through the use of chemical induction) should fall within the scope of the field.