GOD AND THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE

From a recent article in The Jewish Daily Forward [1]:

First, it is helpful to distinguish what we know from what we don’t. At the very least, since I have experienced what mystics have described, by following their recommendations, that means that if I’m deluded, generations of mystics are as well. It’s not just me, and it’s not new; it’s ancient, widespread and revered. Moreover, the mystics’ testimony is “expert” testimony. Contemplatives are precisely the people who have devoted the most attention to the mind and the spirit. I wonder what my Seder interlocutor, a dentist for 30 years, would’ve said if I had doubted the foundations of modern dentistry. Who are you inclined to believe more — the doubter who has never explored these pathways or millions of experts who spent their lives doing so?

...Now, the sense of certainty that arises within mystical experience is not, itself, enough...Nor is it some vague sense of the sublime or a beloved article of faith. Peak contemplative experience feels truer than anything I’ve ever felt; it is more certain than knowing my name. It feels like “Yes, this is it. This is what you have been looking for your whole life.” So that merits at least agnosticism in one’s subsequent reflection.

A second useful analytical tool is to tease apart experience from interpretation. “I felt a great love” could be interpreted as “I felt the love of Hashem” or “I felt the love of Christ” — or just “I felt a great love.” And that depends not on the phenomenology of the experience but the conceptual frame in which it is understood. So as soon as one moves from experience to concepts, one is no longer entitled to the certainty of one’s spiritual perception.

Of course, these questions are not unique to spirituality; they are Epistemology 101. How do you know you’re not in the Matrix right now, or a brain floating in a laboratory jar? You don’t. All you really can say, right now, is “I am having this experience” — not “it is an experience of X.” So if we’re going to be epistemologically skeptical, let’s be consistent about it and doubt every subjective experience, which is to say, every experience there is.

That being said, mystics should make friends with epistemological humility. The reification of subjective experience is precisely what leads to fundamentalism, error and the willingness to kill someone who has an alternative interpretation. Sure, most New Age spiritual people are gentle, and pluralistic to the point of relativism. But as soon as we assert that our subjective spiritual experience has any objective truth, we are on slippery slope to dogmatism.

Especially when the experience gets attached to the label “God.” Really, the word “God” is an experiential exclamation point: Instead of my having a powerful insight, God told me something! Instead of introspection, I’m asking God! This is an invitation to zealotry.

Declining the invitation to interpret experience is also, ultimately, more nourishing. The most wonderful, rapturous mystical state is just a mind-state. It passes. Letting the experience be — without labeling it as specifically religious or attempting to prove anything — allows an experience to be appreciated for what it is, rather than for what the ego may want it to be. You get less stuck.

And you value more. This mind-state (whether devekut, samadhi, unio mystica) isn’t significant because of a story about what it represents; it’s significant because it engenders more compassion and more wisdom. Conversely, a mind-state that may have felt very “mystical” but that brings about cruelty or unskillful behavior is easily judged by its fruits, rather than by the supposedly mystical feeling that accompanied it. One finds in almost every contemplative tradition, theistic and non-theistic, precisely this metric for evaluating truth. The interpretations cannot be verified, but the effects can.

Staying with the experience itself also lessens the risk of idolatry. Any concept we have of God, even an experiential one, is not God; it is a finite concept, tied to the finite mind, conceptualized in terms of other finite concepts. Thus any idea or concept imposed upon the ineffable mystical experience actually takes us further from the Divine. The less said, the better. Material proof has nothing to do with God. It only has to do with mistaken utterances about the world of appearance.

And, finally, valuing spiritual experience without determining a set interpretive frame diminishes the allure of particularism. If we suppose that spirituality can prove the mythic assertions of the Bible, we are mistaken. Indeed, the universality of mystical experience is why contemplatives tend more to be universalists than do non-contemplatives. Though there may be phenomenological differences in different spiritual experiences, mysticism makes plain that, if religion is like a finger pointing to the moon, you can see the moon with any number of pointers, even those a particular tradition or text wants to suppress.


1. See my earlier posts on this subject: "Personal Testimony," "Moroni's Promise," "'Our Father in Heaven'," "Trusting Feelings," "'Feelings...Nothing More Than Feelings'." Also, see Arthur Henry King, "A Man Who Speaks to Our Time from Eternity," Ensign (March 1989).