The mystical experience

The mystical experience is inchoate and as one emerges from it, one attempts to make sense out of it. Cliff Geertz calls this, I believe, re-editing. (Or some such). Due to the general poverty of our intellectual apparatus, this re-editing, or interpretation, has to happen in terms with which we are already familiar. This means that a Christian interprets this experience as Jesus, a Muslim as Allah, a Buddhist as enlightenment, and so forth.

Most explanations tend to the religious, using such mental furniture as supernatural beings and metaphysical orders of the universe. They tend to reaffirm one’s faith in these fanciful constructs. It goes a little bit like this:

A man in glasses looks out the window. “What do you see?” asks his companion further inside the room. “Glasses” answers the man at the window. “Just as I have expected,” says the companion. “Glasses, glasses everywhere”.

It is thus that it comes to happen that the same transcendental experience in two different men ends up confirming them in conflicting worldviews. Like the blind men feeling an elephant. “A tree”, says one, rubbing the elephants’s leg. “A snake”, says another who had come upon his tail. “You are both wrong,” says a third stroking the tusk. “Though what the heck this is, I have no idea.”

I am with the third man here. The really good trick is, of course, not to bother to interpret anything at all and to enjoy the experience as is. Who needs to know what it all means? Most certainly, like everything else, it means nothing.