Are you a mystic??

Perhaps I'm just a cynic at heart, but when someone makes the claim to be a mystic, I make sure my wallet is secure before engaging them in conversation.

I think even the Buddha would encourage this precaution.

Of course I know now that certain spiritual traditions are not the least bit supernatural. Or am I reading the Tao wrong?

I haven't found anything supernatural in the Tao. That's about as natural as it gets, with a sprinkle of anarchy thrown in for good measure. Now Alchemical Taoism, that's a whole 'nother cauldron of elixers.

Sadly, even Taoism is not safe from Wayne Dyer, that bald-headed wannabe mystic hack of the New Age, speaking of "hands out."

I think I reject this model of the situation, but it might be interesting to discuss the model and the situation in depth some time (in another thread)....

...If God is a kind of source of personality and consciousness, a kind of superconsciousness, then the Devil is a kind of sink of personality and consciousness, a kind of subconsciousness. So although both 'peak' and 'trough' experiences bring you closer to reality, in one sense, it is only in the former kind of experience that you fully retain your consciousness and self in doing so. A contact with reality in which you lose yourself (and not in the mystical sense of ego-loss) is not really a contact with reality!

(I know this is very vague and woolly; I also know that vagueness and woolliness are to a large extent to be expected in discussions of mystical matters, for reasons already expressed by Alan; however, I can never be satisfied with being vague and woolly, and do not mean to rest content with words such as these.)

P.P.S. I'm expecting kennethamy to pop up in a moment asking me to distinguish between "vagueness" and "woolliness".

The most highly developed branches of the human family have in common one peculiar characteristic. They tend to produce-sporadically it is true, and often in the teeth of adverse external circumstances-a curious and definite type of personality; a type which refuses to be satisfied with that which other men call experience, and is inclined, in the words of its enemies, to "deny the world in order that it may find reality." We meet these persons in the east and the west; in the ancient, mediaeval, and modern worlds. Their one passion appears to be the prosecution of a certain spiritual and intangible quest: the finding of a "way out" or a "way back" to some desirable state in which alone they can satisfy their craving for absolute truth. This quest, for them, has constituted the whole meaning of life. They have made for it without effort sacrifices which have appeared enormous to other men: and it is an indirect testimony to its objective actuality, that whatever the place or period in which they have arisen, their aims, doctrines and methods have been substantially the same. Their experience, therefore, forms a body of evidence, curiously self-consistent and often mutually explanatory, which must be taken into account before we can add up the sum of the energies and potentialities of the human spirit, or reasonably speculate on its relations to the unknown world which lies outside the boundaries of sense.

I think of the "Satanic" state of mind to be something like the maximum absorption in the self-abstraction. Saddam Hussein said that he didn't care about what people thought of him now. He was thinking of those 500 years in the future who would read about him in history books. He was that absorbed in his personal glory. Talk about a lack of presence in the here and now.....

Let's not deny the pleasure of the ego-absorption. It's even a form of love. But it's a rigid state that is merciless toward any threats to the little prince's status. To what degree was Hitler absorbed in a grandiose fantasy of himself which also included the greatness of Germany. He probably thought of himself as the Ultimate German. And this is how the self-fetish can relate to the world. Everything is a tentacle of ye old great self, that old dragon the devil.

The opposite of this would be an openness, an utter lack of fixity, a recognition of the self as nothing but a construct, an abstraction, a boring biography. Not boring in itself, but boring as an abstraction. When two good friends get together, they talk about something that neither of them can claim. They talk of a shared beauty. Well, I think that a focus on unclaimed shared beauty is related to the mystical. But maybe I shouldn't suggest this, because I don't personally want to adopt the term. Forgive my noisy intrusion!

When I was a teenager, I spent a little time in a Pentecostal church. Now that's entertainment! Of course the music was pure. And some of the "brothers" were pure. I could tell they were striving after a life of love and purity. Hell, they gave me things, like suits that fit to tight. But the preacher had his hand out. And he looked like Norm off Cheers. He was quite a voice, though.

Sadly, even Taoism is not safe from Wayne Dyer, that bald-headed wannabe mystic hack of the New Age, speaking of "hands out."

I don't think kennethamy is especially interested in this kind of subject matter. I think he would say, and I would agree, that this is out-of-scope for philosophy as such. It is a different subject area.

The only word of caution I would add is, read up on some of the genuine literature about this phenomenon. There is a lot of it. I still reckon it is hard to go past Evelyn Underhill as a starting point.

However, I get the impression that you are identifying mysticism in general with the quest for the higher reaches of experience (and so presumably is Alan, therefore it is presumably I who am veering somewhat off-topic)

"Forgive my noisy intrusion!"

I would suggest that one reading of the mystical is that it is to 'see through' this whole structure of 'me and mine'. When you state it baldly like that, it does not sound like much, so it should not be taken literally (or lightly).

My point (which I apologise again for labouring so much) is that the need to "'see through' this whole structure of 'me and mine'" is not something relevant only to the highest/deepest levels of human experience, but is felt, more or less obscurely, in all human experience, most poignantly in our ethical awareness.

That is, I believe it is both possible and desirable to experience what you referred to as "the world" in a less egoistic way than is regarded as 'normal' in Western society, without necessarily attempting to scale the Himalayas of the mind.

I should probably have started another thread, as I'm diverting this one too much, but I never feel ready to start writing about this topic properly, and it is temptingly easier to steal a ride on somebody else's coat-tails. [Damn, is that an actual English phrase?] :perplexed:

A couple of really good existentialist philosopher-psychologists are Viktor Frankl, whose Mankind's Search for Meaning is a well-known classic, and Erich Fromm. I have only read essays of the latter, but I believe his Man For Himself is a great book.

Actually what used to be 'transpersonal psychology' had many great writers in it; I actually edited their Australian newsletter for a few years back in the 80's.

Materialism is the view that all that exists is matter. Scientific materialism would be I suppose someone with this view that also believes that all knowledge can be understood by the scientific method.

Apparently mystical experience can be explained by such things, however no-one has done so to anything like a convincing degree. If mystical experiences are what they appear to be to the subject of them, then this refutes materialism, because they are experiences of higher realities.

Idealism is the contrary monistic position to materialism which says that 'mind' or 'consciousness' or 'spirit' is the absolute thing that exists, not matter, and the external world as we experience it doesn't exist wholly independently of our minds. And this would be the position of the mystic, the opposite one to materialism, and science would just be a study of the patterns of the shadows on the wall of platos cave.