Lifting the Veil off Mysticism. I

One of the strongest pillars of faith for many religious people is a very powerful but entirely personal sense that somehow, they have "experienced" the "reality" of God. It is a very intimate and a wonderfully delicious feeling. They would not give it up for all the world. They would rather die than deny its reality and what it meant and still means for them. I am referring to what has been called "mystical feelings" or "mysticism." Some of those who are fortunate to have experienced them may even claim that they give them a kind of "knowledge" of God more real and far more superior to all other forms of "knowledge" or of "knowing" God. It is not surprising that psychologists have turned their attention to the nature of mysticism. The first one to have done so is William James. He did so in The Varieties of Religious Experience ("VRE)(1902).

In VRE, James quotes the poet Walt Whitman's description of a mystical "knowing" in the absence of any conscious reasoning: "There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education, an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness we call the world ...such soul-sight and root centre for the mind's optimism explains only the surface."

James quotes another poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, who had an analogous feeling: ".all alone...silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words...There is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute directness of mind."

Finally, he quotes the experience of St. Teresa: "One day, it was granted to me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God. I did not perceive them in their proper form, and nevertheless the view I had of them was of a sovereign clearness and has remained vividly impressed upon my soul...The view was so subtle and delicate that the understanding cannot grasp it."

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoievski, the famous Russian novelist who gave us such works as The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler, The Idiot, Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, also had a similar experience. He wrote:"I felt that heaven was going down upon the earth and that it had engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself, yes. You all, healthy people, can't imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second before our fit...I don't know if this felicity last for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one."

To James, such personal religious experience cannot be "imparted or transferred to others." According to Robert A Burton, in his book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not" (2008), James made a "brilliant observation"  when he said, "In this peculiarity, mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect... Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule, they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time....Mystical truth...resembles the knowledge given to us in sensation more than that given by conceptual thought"

Burton calls such "knowledge", "Felt knowledge. Knowledge without thought. Certainty without deliberation or even conscious awareness of having had a thought." Whatever the truth may be, we may observe a number of common features in mystical experiences: 1. they are not "normal" states; 2. they are not "perceived" as St. Teresa says, "in their proper form" 3. they appear with an unusually vivid clarity 4. they appear "without argument" of our "discursive intellect" and are not something which our mind can easily explain or describe and in the words of St. Teresa, it is something "so subtle and delicate that the understanding cannot grasp it"; in other words, they are perceived directly, intuitively and are pre-rational. 5. They feel that they are outside of themselves and have merged with something, someone, some being infinitely greater than themselves. 6. These are feeling states in which the mystic feels a kind of delirious or ecstatic joy and happiness. They are not rational states.