Mysticism

Mysticism is an attitude or practice in many religions and spiritual traditions where people attempt to seek union with what they perceive to be spiritual realities - the One, the absolute, God or the universe - through contemplative and ascetic practices including prayer, meditation, fasting, chanting of mantras koans aphorisms or other devotional sayings, retreat, and occasionally use of psychoactive substances.

Those who practice mysticism often become more syncretistic, seeing religious denominations and philosophies as being different approaches to the unified Oneness of being. Religions which are centred on a holy text - Christianity, Islam and Judaism - often use those texts within mystical practice, meditating on passages and verses. Mystic practices often all point to a similar end goal of oneness - the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, union with Christ in Christianity, Irfan in Islam and so on.

Scientific understanding of mysticism

In recent years, scientists have attempted to study the psychological, biological and sociological causes of religious belief and, by extension, mystical, transcendent and religious experiences. An example of this is Pahnke's Good Friday Experiment in 1962, where divinity students in Boston, Massachusetts, were given psilocybin (with a control group being given niacin as a placebo) before going to a service at the Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Those in the live group claimed to have experienced religious experiences. Others have repeated this experiment, and others, to better explore the link between mysticism and psychology, including Michael Persinger's use of magnetic inducement of temporal lobe activity to prompt mystical or transcendent experiences in those who are prone to such experiences.

The mystic life

It is normal for practising mystics to pass through different stages, though these are not necessarily clearly distinguished. One writer gives a detailed account of five such stages: awakening, purification, illumination, the "dark night of the soul" and union. Other Christian writers commonly list three: the way of purgation, the way of illumination, and the way of union. A non-Christian classification gives a similar set: purification, concentration and identification. The Sufi account in Farid ud-Din Attar's The Conference of the Birds gives no less than seven "valleys" through which the mystic passes, of which the sixth, the valley of astonishment and bewilderment, may correspond in some ways to the dark night of the soul.

These stages seem to relate mainly to what has been labelled as "God-mysticism". Other forms have been identified, including nature-mysticism and soul-mysticism.

Writings

There is a considerable range of mystical writing, some of it, such as the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing and The Conference of the Birds, among the minor classics of literature. Many tracts are in effect instruction manuals for the practice of contemplation, incorporating some of the author's own experience. Others give a lucid account of what they have experienced, while some, like certain writings of William Blake and Jacob Boehme wrestle with the problem of conveying meaning to such an extent that the non-expert reader may be baffled.