Elijah

Yayyy hippies! I’m a living experiment of a couple of hippies.

Not sure what exactly you are experiencing with your mysticism but I like that you are trying to keep it rational. I wouldn’t describe myself as a mystic, mainly because I’m not sure what the word means exactly but I do try to have a practical understanding of the general phenomenon and here’s my take.

I think we are on similar tracks with believing in the zero experience as being the crucial experience and dividing up emotional visionary states verses more sedated reflective states. I do imagine mysticism more with the active emotional side and meditation more with the contemplation pursuit of reality angle. I wouldn’t just toss away the emotional visionary aspect but without an understanding of what is going on, listening to your visions can lead to believing in alllllll kinds of nonsense.

The key to understanding the emotional visionary states is that zero experience that lets you experience yourself as separate from the voice in your head that you identify with yourself. The teacher appears when the student is ready because he recognizes the teacher within and his true self separately.

Most people are sucked into their thoughts like they would be in a TV show or book where they are one with the characters in the story. This is especially easy to fall into when the story being told is in your voice is in your head and speaks from your perspective and speaks as if it is actually you. Pulling out of the narrative in your head is step one to reality.

There are a few ways to familiarize yourself with the voice being separate but meditation is the most popular which is usually just shutting down the stimuli and trying to quiet the mental activity. Usually by focusing it on a single concept or repeating a single mantra so that it eventually fades out without stimuli or attention and reality then turns into a blank canvas and you realize the observer, the true self, is still there to observe the blank canvas and for the first time when your voice disappears you get to feel what it feels like to be actually you and not you listening to a story about you as told by a voice in your head.

Once you recognize your voice you can try to understand what’s going on with it. Beyond recognizing that it’s not actually you, what drives your voice is the next part because understanding what it wants is the key to controlling it instead of it trying to control you.

If all of the bodies’ immediate needs are met and the voice isn’t after food due to fasting or sex due to abstinence or drugs due to addiction then the next thing it usually goes for is emotional response of some type from the person. Now the type of emotion or how the voice gets it out of you depends on the person and what they usually respond to.

I don’t know if this is just a natural response trying to get the body to become more vital and breathe more or if it’s actually after the emotional chemical response. We are generally bad breathers who have to learn to breathe effectively due to us living in an environment that doesn’t require a lot of it from us so the voice could be just trying to excite you into breathing more by showing us something that excites or upsets you.

Our sensory experience is recorded in the brain but how long that memory lasts is usually dependent on how emotional the event was. The more dramatic the experience the clearer and longer the memory lasts.

Now the voice is different than the rest of our experience because we don’t record all its scenarios and crap it throws in front of us because we would be overloaded with data that wasn’t from reality. Daydreaming all day is just like dreaming all night; the mind has a difficult time recording the data because that’s usually done with the benefit of actual physical data coming from the sense not the voice coming from the mind.

But the same phenomenon where emotion makes regular memories last it can also help you record your thoughts as well. This is why the dreams you usually remember are the scary moments or erotic moments.. also repetitive dreams/thoughts can get burned in there, but usually it’s emotional stuff that gets recorded. And in understanding this phenomenon that can lead you into understanding the emotional visionary side of mysticism.

Just like the emotions can help record your dreams they can help record or even visualize your thoughts if elevated enough. This is why people can see a dead loved one while grieving or Paul could see Jesus after feeling guilt of persecuting Christians. The more emotion you have going on the more real the vision/thought becomes.

Now this can happen by circumstance or with practice and manipulation of our thoughts and emotions. If you love god enough you can see god regardless if you believe in an anthropomorphic guy or universal constant that unifies existence.

Throw in being able to separate yourself from your voice and assigning a different POV you get a recipe for people being exposed to all kinds of craziness that looks like they are actually tapping into something.

The only vision you should listen to is reality. Not the limited version meditation shows you or the illusionary version the rapturous mystics see but the actual reality of the situation. The only spiritual element you should align yourself to is the truth. Like Jesus said “everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” You have to know what’s going on around you to know what you need to be doing or to know what he was doing.

The closer you are to the truth about who you are and what is going on in the world, the closer you are to doing what you need to do. And doing what needs to be done as it needs to be done is the true mysticism, when you are truly actually aligned with the Way or the will of God.

No Robots

Does it make sense to you if I were to say that we can see reality as a system of interconnected thoughts?

gurugeorge

Good post, I agree with much of what you say. I'd say you are a mystic if you have actually practiced or had any experience of any of the things you are talking about (e.g. separating the witness from the observed, realising you are not your thoughts, etc.)

Basically, "awakening" experience, mystical experience at the highest level, is depersonalisation, but in a context where it's not something that comes unbidden (and is therefore frightening and disorienting) but has been sought (as a culturally valid goal). Whatever thing that's going in the brain, I reckon it's just about the same thing in both these cases, but the context makes all the difference as to how it affects the rest of the brain and the person's life.

But it's not just depersonalisation, it's also the simultaneous seeing of what one actually is (now that one sees one is not a person): and that is, simply, the Universe (or whatever one likes to call the totality of being or existence itself).

In and of itself, this insight is extremely simple (and consistent with the findings of naturalistic cognitive science). What seems to happen is that people have this experience, and then when they come back to normal, they interpret it in terms of their surrounding culture and religion (just like I've done! ).

The pinnacle, in a sense, of all this is Enlightenment, but that is not an experience: it's actually an understanding that what one perceived in one's depersonalisation experience has already always been the case. Even in one's "normal" frame of mind when one thinks one is a self, there is actually no such thing ...

No Robots

The following quotation from David Bidney's The Psychology and Ethics of Spinoza: A Study in the History and Logic of Ideas (p. 414-9) neatly summarizes many of the points under discussion here:

Spinoza's theory of intellectual love does not involve ecstatic absorption in the One as the Neo-Platonists and Hindus held; the intuitive love and vision of God are a dynamic, rational force which determines an individual to seek knowledge of created nature and to take an active interest in social affairs. (See Note 1, below.) At this point religion, ethics, and science merge.

In his Ethics Spinoza tried to present a rational system of universal salvation, one that would be independent of unique supernatural revelations in time through chosen individuals or nations. The revelation of God, he believed, was something rational and natural which was common to the great teachers of all peoples at all times. True religion and morality, he held, unite all men and are invincible forces for the maintenance of peace. When one takes into consideration the unceasing strife throughout the ages between men of diverse religious and ethical persuasions, one cannot but conclude that Spinoza's Ethics still bears a vital message for the modern world.

Note 1: The practical conflict between the materialistic quest for power and other-worldly asceticism is graphically described by Rabindranath Tagore in his poetic book entitled Sadhana. Like Spinoza, Tagore maintains that an adequate, sane philosophy of life is one that harmonizes naturalism and idealism, the interest in life of the humanist and the quest for permanent being of the mystic. This, they agree, can be brought about only by realizing the immanence of God in nature and the heart of man.

What the world needs, according to Tagore, is a harmonization of the virtues of the West and the East. The West has physical power but physical power in and by itself is blind and does not make for happiness. A philosophy of becoming where everything, including God, is "in the making" leads to ultimate irrationality. On the other hand, the East tends to disregard the world and to concentrate on the salvation ad liberation of the soul. The East tends to disparage human individuality and self-assertion and to aggrandize Brahma which is the cosmic principle of being. True freedom, Tagore counsels, lies, not in the negation of action and physical power, but in the effort to utilize it in the service of the divine, spiritual power. All nature is an expression of God or Brahma and therefore all nature is intrinsically good and is to be consecrated to Him.