Hi Joe –
Nice to meet you Well I’ve been called here by my friend Jason who is a complete gentleman. I’ve had my mind on other things but since he’s’ called me and I do possibly have something to contribute to your fascinating discussion here, I am here like the genie in the lamp.
First of all I’ve been a person on this site who has talked quite a lot about the Christian mystics – so it’s appropriate that I do try and give some thoughts.
ON a personal note I had lots of broadly mystical experiences in my adolescence at precisely the time when I was in a rather authoritarian fundamentalist charismatic mileu – and my peers did not help me in any way to cope with these. A canny spiritual director who knew something about the human heart and with some broader knowledge of medicine would have been able to help. I actually have temporal lobe epilepsy – and I’m very happy to take the medication that stops the visions and the involuntary emotional bombardments that are a part and parcel of temporal lobe complex partial seizures. So that’s me for you
I’ve read and greatly enjoyed William James’s classic on mystical experience. Also in my late adolescence I read some of the countercultural stuff like Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and the fraudulent books of Carlos Casteneda linking experimentation with drugs and mystical experiences (very uneasy ). I think these self validating experiences of oneness are perennial; perhaps they occur more in religious people but they are not confined to religious people (I remember the writings of an Atheist named Richard Jeffries often came up in studies of mystical states).
I remember profiting from reading R.C. Zahener’s book Mysticism Sacred and Profane which is an answer to Aldous Huxley. He helpfully surveys the mystical literature across religions and distinguishes an amoral perception of everything being one and of being one with everything, to other mystical states where the person having the experience is not sucked into an amorphous oneness but rather has a perception of the ‘personalising energy’ of universal compassion coursing through and sustaining all things (which is found across the religions and not confined to Christianity, Judaism and Islam). My reading in world religions – especially regarding religion and violence – has confirmed Zahener’s misgivings about the validity of ‘everything is one’ experiences – that he terms pan-en-henism. This for example is a state that is striven for with harsh and brutal discipline in the samurai Rinzai sect of Japanese Zen – and actually turns people into highly efficient amoral killers for whom life and dearth are one. I remember Zahener drawing parallels between Rinzai Zen writings and the ramblings of Charles Manson.
I feel a little unesay with identifying mysticism with Maslow type peak Julian of Norwich and William Law – my two favourites – are not focussed on this.
Julian had a series of near death experiences as a young woman which supplied her with a powerful fund of images and experiences to work with. I think the great women doctors of the spiritual life often work like this – they keep their roots in experience (often bodily experience) and work creatively with images and intuition rather than with purely rational categories (Catherine OF Genoa, Metchild of Magedeburg and Hildegard von Bingen also spring to mind). But what matters with Julian is her reflections upon her experiences over a life time as much as the experiences themselves. She enquires after them for greater and more compassionate understanding of the lot and the perplexities of her fellow ‘even Christians’. She is concerned that her experience should be interpreted in the language of Holy Church and not to contradict this – but she is able to come up with stunning insights into the reach of the love of God in Christ for us poor creatures. And her visions enabled her to reach out to her neighbours in their affliction with illness, war, famine with a message of comfort and edification.
William Law – although counted a mystic – is on record as saying that he never had any special experiences. His writings are to do with the inner work of trying from self to God over a life time. (He was almost certainly influenced by Mother Julian and in turn influenced George MacDonald). It’s interesting that he had so many run ins with his dear friend John Wesley who loved Law but did not comprehend him. Two points of contention were over Laws’ purgatorial universalism and his specific interpretation of God’s wrath – very different from Wesley’s. Btu another thing that affronted Wesley was Law’s stress that states of inner assurance were not to be idolised as fruits of the spirit. Wesley took great exception to this – which is surprising (or perhaps not so surprising ) because Wesley’s private correspondence reveals that he lacked the experience of settled assurance that he preached (Wesley was a depressive). I’m rambling but I think another emphasis of the mystics that I see as good sorts(including Catherine of Genoa who von Hugel majored on) is an understanding that peak experiences may come but they also go (and they are no mark of begin special) and that there will be a place and a time for lack of feeling, and for patience in dry prayer – sitting faithfully turning the will away from self towards Love especially when we fell nothing. I know that dry prayer in Quaker meetings saved my sanity and perhaps my life after too much high octane religion and too much confusion because of epileptic states when I was young. So I’m a fan of it