Mysticism

Mysticism is a spiritual experience that is virtually universal in religious traditions. It is also a problematic category for analysis, though it nonetheless retains heuristic value in the contemporary study of religion, culture, and society. The original Greek term mystikos and its English derivative mystical have a specific history. Historically, the dimensions of what has been deemed mystical include, as Louis Bouyer notes, initiatory and esoteric religiosity, hermeneutics, liturgy, and experience. The term has also been used in an imprecise way in popular culture and nonspecialist discourse, but such uses will not be the focus of this entry.

In the field of religious studies, the term is probably best understood as synonymous with mystical experience; such experiences differ according to particular mystics and religious traditions. Mystical experience is a subcategory of “religious experience” or “anomalous experience,” but it is not reducible to “altered states of consciousness.” Such anomalous events include glossolalia, lucid dreaming, near-death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OBEs), psi-related experiences (“paranormal” abilities), and synesthesia. This is not to mention other, more “mundane” religious experiences such as a feeling of communal belonging while sitting as a member of a religious congregation. Although mystical experience is often elevated to the highest form of religious experience and as the essence of religions, greater reflection on the accuracy and dangers of that characterization is required.

On the most basic level, mystical experience may be defined as an experience of that which a given individual or community identifies as sacred or ultimate. There is no single, essential, and “ultimate” form of mystical experience; there are, in fact, many types of mystical experiences, which differ according to the community and tradition involved and which assume different soteriologies and theologies. The present definition also does not preclude the possibility that there are “nonre-ligious” mystical experiences, such as a feeling of oneness with Nature or the cosmos (Zaehner's panenhenic category), or that, as noted by Louis Komjathy, some individuals may have had “transtradition” experiences that lead to religious conversion. “Nonreligious” experiences would still be “mystical” because an individual or a group defines them as sacred or ultimate.

Mystical experience consists of four primary dimensions: (1) the trigger (source), (2) the actual experience (not reducible to physiology), (3) its interpretation, and (4) the context. This is not to claim that one of these is more primary than another or that they are independent. Instead, the study of mysticism requires one to investigate the relationships.

The above “definition” is phenomenological, not normative. It does not privilege one type of mystical experience, one conception of self, or one theology over another. From this perspective, some interpretative challenges include studying the specific views of self, specific types of mystical experiences, and specific theologies (conceptions of the sacred) among different adherents and religious communities. Among certain mystics, and unfortunately among many scholars of mysticism, a monotheistic/monistic theology is assumed, that is, the informing worldview is that “reality” is unitary rather than pluralistic in nature.

Specific views of self, related practices, as well as the relationship among self, community, and society also deserve careful attention. The slatter point is key: Mystical experiences always occur in [Page 856]a sociohistorical and religiocultural context. This recognition does not deny the potentially transformative effects on the individual involved, but it begs the question of how such experiences are conditioned by, received within, and framed inside specific contexts. Mystical experience is thus simultaneously individual and communal; in relation to religious traditions, mystical experiences may be either conservative or subversive. Some communities value and affirm such experiences, whereas others de-emphasize or reject the relevance. An example of the latter would be the emphasis on grace and the Bible as the revealed/inspired word of God in certain forms of Protestant Christianity, or the Church and its ecclesiastical representatives as interpretative authorities in Roman Catholicism. In addition to the medieval heresy trials, one finds an example of such concern in the “Norms of the Congregation for Proceeding in Judging Alleged Apparitions and Revelations,” issued by the Papal Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on February 25, 1978. There are similar reservations concerning the relevance of “mystical experiences” in certain Zen Buddhist movements and in specific Daoist internal alchemy communities, not to mention contemporary secular-materialist dismissals of mystical experience as nothing more than social constructions or neurophysiology (see below). The underlying motivations and political dimensions of such attempts to corral mystical experiences also deserve consideration.

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