What Do Mystics Have In Common?

[xexon]

A common person is someone in a dark room with a small penlight. Wherever they shine the beam is what they see.

A mystic is someone who turns on the lights so that all can be seen.


x

 

[Willamena]

(quote) 5. Mystics of all traditions also agree that when distinctions created by imagination are taken to be real—especially the distinction between 'subject' and 'object', 'I' and 'other', 'self' and 'world'—we lose sight of the Ultimate Nature of Reality and fall into delusion. This is the cause of all our suffering.

6. The fact that distinctions are not ultimately real means that we are not truly separate selves. In Reality, all mystics declare, our True Nature is God, Brahman, Buddha-Nature, the Tao, or Consciousness Itself.

In my opinion, #5 and #6 are ambiguously worded, and such wording has (had) caused me no end of distress in trying to grasp the concepts expressed. I would say, rather,

5. Mystics of all traditions also agree that when distinctions, created by the mind, are taken to be reality --especially the distinction between 'subject and 'object', 'i' and 'other', 'self' and 'world' --we "lose sight," figuratively speaking, of the bigger picture and participate in delusion...

What is not mentioned is that the delusion we participate in is quite real; it even goes as far as to suggest the opposite is true in #6. What that suggestion serves to do is create a distinction between 'real' and 'unreal' --'unreal' being something we can participate in that is not ultimately "there." But it is there, or we could not participate in it.

"Taken" is the operative word: we do a "take" of reality, like a snapshot, and call it real. "Real" is what we make of reality. We cannot know "ultimate truth" or "ultimate reality" --we can know "what is true" and "what is real" because they are ours to hold; we took them, we own them, as limited a picture as they may be; they are part of the delusion that we embrace and in which we function.

Re-wording #6, it then becomes,

6. The fact that distinctions do not ultimately reflect reality means that beyond the delusion we operate in we are not truly separate selves. In reality, all mystics declare, our True Nature is God, Brahman, Buddha-Nature, the Tao, or Consciousness Itself.

I think that's less ambiguously worded. Yes?

 

[Valjean]

All Hominids are neurologically wired to be able to achieve the Mystical Experience. Aldous Huxley, in his cross-cultural research, found descriptions of the mystical experience in every culture examined, throughout history. He labeled it "Philosophia Perennis" -- Perennial philosophy.

Mystical consciousness generally describes 9 characteristics: Pahnke 1963, W James,1929, W.T. Stace, (1960).

1. Undifferentiated Unity.
An "Ultimate Reality" where individual consciousness merges with a Ground of Being beyond all empirical distinctions. Individual ego is extinguished. Subject and object cease to exist as separate entities. "All is one." "We are all the same thing."

2. Intuitive, non rational knowledge of Reality.
Jame's "Noetic Quality." "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" (James, 1929).
Such insight is intuitively felt to be of a more fundamental form of Reality than either the phenomenon of everyday consciousness or the most vivid of dreams and hallucinations.

3. Transcendence of Space and Time.
A radical change in perspective in which the subject feels as though he is outside of time, in eternity or infinity, beyond both past and future. In this state of consciousness space and time become meaningless concepts. One experiences the totality of history in an unbroken continuity of past and future.

4. Sacredness.
A profound sense of holiness and sacredness. Otto's "mysterium tremendum."
"The most impressive and intense part of this experience was the white light of absolute purity and cleanness...The associated feelings were those of absolute awe, reverence, and sacredness." (Rudolf Otto, 1958).

5. Deeply felt positive mood.
An intense feeling of joy, love, blessedness and peace. "A state resembling prolonged, intense sexual orgasm."

6. Paradoxicality.
Aspects of Mystical Consciousness are felt to be true despite violating Aristotelian logic; a feeling of 'out of body' while still in the body. An awareness of..."undifferentiated unity, embracing the perfect identity of subject and object, of singleness and plurality, of the One and the Many." ...logic also boggles at how I could at once perceive and yet be those colours and forms, how the seer, the seeing and the seen, the feeler the feeling and the felt could all be one; but, to me, all this was so clearly self-evident as to suggest the words 'childishly simple." (Blofeld, 1966).

7. Ineffability.
The contention that language in incapable of describing the experience. Cf: Plato's cave or a Neanderthal suddenly transported into downtown Manhattan then returned to his cave to explain his experience to his wife.

8. Transiency.
The temporary Nature of Mystical Consciousness, the awareness lasting minutes or hours, distinguishing it from a state of clinical psychosis.
[Personally I disagree with this feature. The author is poorly informed. Such a state can be permanent, perhaps characterized as a sort of temporal status epilepticus].

9. Positive changes in attitudes/behavior.
A change in attitude toward oneself, others, toward life and toward Mystical Consciousness itself. Subjects report increased personal integration, personal worth and a relaxation of habitual mechanisms of ego-defense. "It is the power of being-itself that accepts and gives the courage to be." "To accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable." (Tillich, 1952).

Cf: Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism. Walter N. Pahnke, William A. Richards.

 

[Random]

What Seyorni said above.

Oh, and a profound love of contrariness.

 

[Quagmire]

Great thread Sunstone

.

From what I've read it sounds like all the mystics are saying the same thing. The language they use varies a bit, usually phrased in terms of their culture and intended audience but so far as I can tell they're all conveying the same message.

It's interesting to read what mystics from the various cultures and ages had to say---Hafez, Kadir, Lao Tzu, Psuedo Dynonesus (sp), even the more mystically minded philosophers (Socrates, Pathagorus) and some of the authors of the Bible--and compare notes.

Funny, this morning I was thinking along these lines and I found myself wonderring about Jesus; "Was he just saying the same things phrased in terms of the Judean/Zorasturan mythology of his audience"?

Think that would make an interesting thread.

 

[Charles]

In my opinion, #5 and #6 are ambiguously worded, and such wording has (had) caused me no end of distress in trying to grasp the concepts expressed. I would say, rather,

5. Mystics of all traditions also agree that when distinctions, created by the mind, are taken to be reality --especially the distinction between 'subject and 'object', 'i' and 'other', 'self' and 'world' --we "lose sight," figuratively speaking, of the bigger picture and participate in delusion...

What is not mentioned is that the delusion we participate in is quite real; it even goes as far as to suggest the opposite is true in #6. What that suggestion serves to do is create a distinction between 'real' and 'unreal' --'unreal' being something we can participate in that is not ultimately "there." But it is there, or we could not participate in it.

"Taken" is the operative word: we do a "take" of reality, like a snapshot, and call it real. "Real" is what we make of reality. We cannot know "ultimate truth" or "ultimate reality" --we can know "what is true" and "what is real" because they are ours to hold; we took them, we own them, as limited a picture as they may be; they are part of the delusion that we embrace and in which we function.

Re-wording #6, it then becomes,

6. The fact that distinctions do not ultimately reflect reality means that beyond the delusion we operate in we are not truly separate selves. In reality, all mystics declare, our True Nature is God, Brahman, Buddha-Nature, the Tao, or Consciousness Itself.

I think that's less ambiguously worded. Yes?

5) Real and Unreal. Personaly, Real, its physical, you can feel it, touch it, smell it, see it in the physical plain, emotion would come into this as well, but the problem is with emotion, people who have lost loved ones or found loved ones or experienced losses or winnings have felt similar emotions, even sexual emotion but these emmotions can differ slighty from person to person and come from the innerself which only you know, but can happen to all humaity as we all have same equal potential.

6)Inbetween Real and Unreal, a thought, could be an invention or a design, a desire in ones mind, it is real because it has been created in thought, but is unreal because it has not been implimented in the physical world. Emotion and thought, creates chemicals in the body, as well as the physical senses becoming on guard in touch with thought in the name of self protection for oneself or family members, which can also produce chemicals of excitement or protection. Emmotion, i call it the soul on a 'full one'. The senses of the body and thought, effecting the soul.
Just listening to your Heart should guide most people. But then again sacrifices have to be made sometimes.

Unreal I would just call a lie, like saying I flew last night. landed on the moon and sat down had a cigar and a pint of lager whilst sitting on the edge of a cratrr looking down at mother earth rotating in the glorious radiant brilliant blast of the the light rays of the Suns Glory.

But then again it is a thought, so real in mind, but unreal in potential, well perhaps 50 years technology, who knows.
.