Everyday Mysticism

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense. – Rumi (1)

I cannot remember ever having had a full-on mystical experience. You know, the kind with enveloping light, beautiful music, and feelings of ecstasy. Nor have I had a Near Death Experience in which people report experiencing phenomena such as brightness, bliss, and a feeling of being so at home that they don’t want to come back. Those I have visited with can hardly describe their NDE’s without wistful tears. Sometimes, I envy people who have those kinds of mystical experiences, whether they occur spontaneously, under anesthesia, or with the aid of psychedelics.

Still, I consider myself a mystic. The reason is, I regularly experience a deep sense of oneness with Nature, and especially with other people, which I am unable to fully describe with words. I experience these phenomena as a connection beyond language in a space of intuitive knowing that feels much deeper than my conscious mind. When this sense arises, I am usually sitting still in interior silence with an open posture of deep listening.

I have experienced this oneness alone while meditating. I frequently experience it with patients or their family members who I support in my work as a hospice chaplain. I have also experienced it with the other people sitting in silence together at the Quaker Meeting I attend.

For over a decade, I have been drawn toward the practice of mysticism. I have traced the mystical thread through the stories and writings of some Christian saints, Buddhist teachers, the Tao Te Ching, Jewish rabbis, Hindu sages, Sufi poets, Secular thinkers, and a whole bunch of people who have gotten sober working the Twelve Steps as a spiritual path of recovery.

My life experience has made it important for me that mystical does not necessarily equal esoteric. The mysticism I practice is available to all people and does not depend on any kind of initiation, secret knowledge, priest, or guru. It is already present within everyone who wants it.

William James identified the following four characteristics most mystical experiences include:

1. Ineffability (words are inadequate to describe them).
2. Noetic Quality (intuitive knowing beneath the level of the discursive intellect).
3. Transiency (they typically do not last long).
4. Passivity (the sense of the experience happening to me rather than being done by me). (2)

Mystical experiences may also include such phenomena as: the deflation of the Ego (and openness to powers greater than my ego); an awareness of the interconnectedness of everything (oneness); awareness that the present moment is all there is; letting go of attachments to our emotional programs for happiness (e.g., safety and security, esteem and affection, and power and control); and a concrete desire to be of practical service to others. (3) 

There are a few practices I have found conducive to my kind of mystical experiences. For example, sitting in silence, deep listening, stillness, and humility—to become comfortable with not knowing—are long-term spiritual practices which have helped to attune my awareness toward this oneness. I have also engaged in the cortical brain-work of reading books and articles, thinking, reflecting, writing, having conversations, and listening to lectures and podcasts, which have all helped condition my conscious openness to mystical experiences. 

Something I also appreciate about mystical experiences is that they don’t seem to depend on where a person locates themselves on the Supernaturalist—Materialist spectrum. They have been experienced across the ages by all kinds of people from all the cultures of the world regardless of belief or non-belief in the supernatural. I happen to locate myself somewhere on the naturalistic side of the middle. I used to be a mystical supernaturalist and now I’m a mystical naturalist. Mysticism has actually helped me collapse the supernaturalist construct of a fragmented universe into the integrated oneness of everything I celebrate as a Spiritual Naturalist. 

Here’s the curiosity, though. As my beliefs have changed over the years, my mystical experiences have remained remarkably similar. This suggests to me two things: 1) That the mystical is a glimpse of something real; and 2) that the mystical occurs at a deeper level than beliefs. As in the Rumi poem, above, mystical experience provides a basis for peaceful connections in the realm of oneness with others of different beliefs and from different backgrounds. In the mystical, there is no other.

Why might having a mystical experience be desirable? For me, they help me to cope adaptively with change, which is what any spiritual practice worth its salt should do. The sense of well-being that arises for me along with the awareness of my non-separate oneness with the universe, and with other people, helps me to be more kind and loving to myself and others. I have experienced the sense that everything is okay and is going to be okay. And that love is the root and ground of all. To become aware of and be guided by these phenomena from deep within oneself is a very different experience than reflecting on, subscribing to, and seeking to conform one’s behavior to external structures of religious, political, and cultural dogma. For these reasons, even if mystical experiences are phenomena occurring entirely within the subjective neurological function of the person having them, they are worth having.

Other people will have their own experiences and offer different answers using different words in an attempt at describing the ineffable. Attend to the mystical long enough and you will notice common themes recurring that fortify an internal spaciousness toward ways of describing that are different than you might use for yourself. For example, it is a helpful discipline for me to read a religious mystic and find commonality with their experience without sharing their terminology or beliefs.

Having written all of this, I want to note that I feel an internal hesitancy identifying as a mystic. It feels presumptuous. Better to have mystical experiences and not know what to call them than to call oneself a mystic and come off sounding like a know-it-all. I do not know it all. I am doing my best to feel my way along just like the rest of us. I am motivated to write about mystical experiences as plainly as I can so that other people will know they are possible. The deep mystery is remarkably simple. Love is everything, and all will be well. If you want to have mystical experiences, try some of the things discussed in this article. Everything you need is already within you.

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Notes:

1. Online at, https://poetrysociety.org/poetry-in-motion/out-beyond-ideas-of-wrongdoing-and-rightdoing. 
2. James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism, Hoboken:Start Publishing LLC (2013).
3. These emotional programs for happiness were articulated frequently by Fr. Thomas Keating. See, e.g., Joy Andrews Hayter, Thomas Keating’s Call to Wisdom, Contemplative Outreach, October 18, 2023, online at, https://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/2023/10/18/thomas-keatings-call-to-wisdom/.