Whirling Dervishes, Istanbul. Photo by Lohen11
Recent events have me thinking yet again about ecstasy, mind, spirit and the power of suggestion and belief. The laying on of hands by Pentecostals. The ecstatic motions of Sufis. The chanting OMs of Hindus and Buddhists. The trance-states of shamans, west, east, south and north.
The universal appearance of X proves that X is not uniquely the province of any one region, culture, or religion. By definition. As in, if there are instances of peanut butter all over the world, then no one religion can claim ownership of peanut butter or its source. No one religion can logically claim they hold the only key to the peanut butter cabinet, when members of dozens of religions have access.
To take this sticky metaphor a bit further. Each case of peanut butter appearance has a story regarding the origin of that peanut butter. Many will pull resources and agree to the same origin, but across the world there will be hundreds of those origins. Same thing. Peanut butter. Hundreds of origins for that same thing.
The chances that they are all right about their interpretations of origins is minuscule. But the chance that only one interpretation out of hundreds is right is less than zero. The sheer multiplicity of origin stories all but negates the possibility of one being right and all of the rest being wrong. The sheer multiplicity of authentically striving adepts from dozens of religions, each looking for peanut butter, negates the extremely narrow view that only one holds the key to the origin of the cabinet.
The origin of the cabinet and the origin of the peanut butter. Organized religions want you to go through them to get to their particular cabinet. They don't want you to go to the store and find the peanut butter for yourself. They also don't want you to notice that people all around the world have their cabinets too, and their access to that peanut butter, and their own names for the cabinet, the peanut butter, and the source of both. That would, of course, confuse people and perhaps push them toward removing the middle men.
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A subject for a later day: What is happening when people feel the ecstasy, peace, serenity, or blast coming from a religious (or poetic, artistic, musical) experience? Is it the merger of the conscious and subconscious minds? Is it truly a meeting with a divine being or force? Is it the meeting of humans and just one divine source, with just one name and one story?
Is it all in our heads, or is there some outside force involved?
For me, the universality of the experience rules out the possibility that any one religion is right and all others are wrong. I see that as physically and logically impossible. My questions then are mostly reduced to two possibilities.
(Of course, my questions are virtually endless, but these two are essential)
1. Is this experience simply the result of the power of suggestion, belief, or faith in something beyond us that actually does not exist . . . which causes, in some cases, for some people, a powerful physiological alteration?
2. Is there a divine force that works on those willing to believe, practice, strive for at-one-ness, but that makes no distinction based upon region, culture, or religion? As in, a divine being or force that couldn't possibly care less about what it is called or the stories humans have developed about it in pursuit of explanation and understanding?
Again, to be continued . . . .
So much positive to respond to in this article I hardly know where to begin…
I’ve been investigating techniques and theory of spiritual ecstasis for many years, although I can’t claim much insight. However, one thing I have become attuned to is how much of what has been traditionally linked to mystical experience seems rooted in neurochemistry, specifically the play of endorphins. I wouldn’t see this in a reductionist/materialist sense necessarily — ascribing ecstasy a chemical linkage doesn’t have to mean that that’s ALL there is to it, but that there is an (inevitable?) chemical concomitant.
An excellent book related to the subject I’d like to suggest is Peter O’Leary’s _A Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness_. Rather than try to summarize it, here’s a link to the book itself: http://www.upne.com/0 – 8195-6563 – 6.html .
Specifically what I enjoy about it is O’Leary’s linkage between mystical experience as well as the creative process and temporal lobe epilepsy, and not just in Duncan’s case, but with several other poets as well. In terms of your blog post, it doesn’t attempt to define mystical experience per se, but is a rather mind-blowing point of departure in terms of thinking about the relationship between creativity, mysticism, and the processes of the brain.
Another related book is Donald Pinchbeck’s _Breaking Open the Head_. It concerns the use of tryptamine-based hallucinogens in various shamanic, spiritual, and creative contexts. Wherever one stands on the subject of the value and efficacy of hallucinogens, it is a fascinating look at the subject, and one that helped me to understand the cultural phenomena around hallucinogen-based shamanism much better. Again, I see the value not so much in a reductionist approach to the substance of ecstasy, but in a deeper and perhaps more empirically-grounded understanding of the brain chemistry around mystical/ecstatic experience.
I’ve rambled on much longer than I intended to. Apologies. Hope to continue the dialogue as time and circumstance allows…
Tony
What if we decide not to assign a shape or form that is familiar to us, or is derived through scientific research from shapes or forms that are familiar to us — what if we decide not to assign such a shape or form to spirits and spirit worlds as a way of explaining the unusual, the transforming and the mystical/ecstatic events to which they relate? What if we know and acknowledge these experiences and value them, and thus know that a spirit world is real, just because intuitively we know it to be so, but do not call this spirit world out by means of using these terms? What if we decide not to use the essential descriptions of our customary understanding to allude to something we nevertheless know to be true and wonderful and real? What then?
@Tony Jones —
Thanks, Tony. I will have to take a look at those books. I’ve always found the subject fascinating. Three of my (as yet) unfinished novels attempt to tackle it in some form. Though, not with the kind of success I had hoped. Perhaps your book recs will get me closer.
Ultimately, I believe names and long histories get in our way. Psychologically, what something is called, and the long organization behind it, get between us and the religious experience, as Kierkegaard said in fewer words. How different is the experience when someone uses a different vehicle? Music, for instance. For most people, it doesn’t have the connotations or the baggage that comes with organized religion, but it can produce similar results. I’m guessing our minds predetermine part of the outcome, however, because of the various degrees of baggage, doctrine, history, etc. etc. I wonder if experiments have been done to try to control for the vehicle …
???
Thanks again for your excellent comments.
@Robert Mueller —
Good point. Sort of, “naming is killing.”
Or, “Defining is killing.”
Sounds like you are promoting a holistic approach, which I agree with. Tangentially, there is an enormous potential for peace once the world accepts that there is no one religion that has all of the answers, and looks at things holistically.
Without that acceptance, I fear organized religions will always be one of the major catalysts for war and strife in general. That just seems to come with the territory. Inherent in the logic. Believing that “we’re right and your wrong” passionately … often leads to ferocity of feeling … and blindness regarding the views of others. Mix that with the call to convert others, and you get a witch’s brew of trouble.
We would all be better off, IMO, if we remained humble and lovingly curious in the face of mystery.
<>
Couldn’t have said this better myself…
I think the problem is not the fact of using words to describe things — such is inevitable given the way our brains are wired — but it’s the sense of exclusion. Reminds me of the passage in Genesis where Adam names the animals — as though Adam somehow bestows on each animal its essential nature to the exclusion of other possibilities. It seems to me the poet is trying to use words without being enslaved to them (at least that’s what I try to do in my poetry…) To display but to distort or turn it around in some way to expose the relativity of all things.
Aristotle doesn’t help us here — his sense of “a is not non a” when jacked into a political or magisterial authority structure is part of the problem with organized religion. I don’t think that means organized religion has no value, but that historically the toxicities have at least approached the benefits in degree.
There’s a line in Tolkien to the effect of “to possess gold but not to be mastered by it.” To me, figuratively speaking, this is the case with words. To be able to use them but not to buy into their pretense to delimit and undergird what is.
@Cuchulain —
just fyi, but Kierkegaard is another writer who it is theorized had temporal lobe epilepsy.
@Tony Jones —
Did not know that about Kierkegaard. There is a superb biography (at least the reviews say so) by Joakim Garff. Have not gotten around to it yet, but have always found his life and thought fascinating. A towering figure, despite his worldly form.
@Tony Jones —
Well said. I like the analogy of gold and mastery. On a somewhat indirect line, it reminds me of Goethe’s call to know all of philosophy, but keep it out of your writing.
(Of course he means to let it slip in through the subconscious, or something like that.)
Perhaps much of this goes back to Taoist and Zenish “non-contrivance” as well.
Basically, we bottle things up when we need to liberate them and ourselves.
A cliche, a truism … but still the way of the world.
@Cuchulain —
As I reread your original post I come to the propositions “The universal appearance of X proves that X is not uniquely the province of any one region, culture, or religion…” and “No one religion can logically claim they hold the only key to the peanut butter cabinet, when members of dozens of religions have access…” This raises an important question for me, which I guess relates to a fundamental uneasiness I have about the issue of synchronic analysis of mystical experience across traditions, and that is, simply, is the appearance of X actually universal or, to abuse your analogy, is it really the same peanut butter in everyone’s cabinet. In other words, can we assume that the core of all mystical experience is the same?
I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer — I have had mystical experiences but have certainly not practiced within all the traditions mentioned. From my own experiences within (at different times) Pentecostal, Catholic, and Shamanic contexts, it seems that they all had quite different flavors, although there were commonalities, perhaps the subject for another post. And while you mention that names and long histories get in the way — which point I appreciate — I wonder if those narratives as context for mystical experience are not also determinative of the content to some extent as well. Could it not also be a case of apples, and oranges, not to mention pomegranates and plaintains…so that it’s not the case that there is a single unitive mystical experience encased in various shells of different traditions, but that the core mystical experiences of each tradition are also unalienably distinct, and that’s just the way it should be, for, as Morgan Freeman’s character mentions in the otherwise execrable film “Robin Hood,” “Allah likes variety.”
All of which I mention to make the point that I think it’s possibly that the contextual “shell” does not necessarily detract from the content, and perhaps it is an indissoluble part of it. This is not to deny in any way the problems of religious authoritarianism mentioned before, that is certainly an occupational hazard of attempting to routinize charisma — in Mary Douglas’ phrase — but again — and I’m starting to bore myself with repetition so please pardon me if you’re getting bored too– perhaps every mystical experience has it’s own flavor, and there is not a “meta”-experience.
just thoughts…
@Tony Jones —
Excellent points, Tony. Actually, what you say clarifies and extends what I wrote. Better than I could meself. Perhaps the original analogy or metaphor is faulty. Because, yes, the experience itself is varied across cultures, regions and religions. I should have said as much. It’s tricky, because I want to say that the core experience is the same across all lines, but that the context alters that experience, directs it, shapes it. Which is what I mean by the names getting in the way. Etc.
Perhaps it’s more about what the experience isn’t, as opposed to what it actually is. As in, the variety of religious experience doesn’t really suggest that any one experience is valid while all others are invalid – even though they can be quite different. What this really tells me, has always told me, is that the variety and sameness proves the validity of multiple forms of that experience. The sameness meaning that the experience of the numinous, the mystical, the mysterious, across so many cultures and so many millennia, proves that no one region, culture or religion was ever necessary for that experience to happen. Humans did not have to wait until a certain religion appeared on the scene before they had these experiences. As far as we know, they’ve always had them.
People once thought that Athena spoke to them. They actually believed that with all their heart and soul. People once thought (some still do) that they could become certain animals, or that some animals were parallel souls for them. Again, they believed this with all of their heart and soul. Some now believe that Allah or Jesus talks to them or that they can meet them mystically. It’s not all peanut butter, of course. There are differences in form and kind. But there is a sameness in the appearance of those differing forms.
Paradoxes can sometimes be a pain in the neck.
;>)