minds—over literally thousands of years—to find the words for this
extraordinary human experience and make sense of it. When we read the
testimony of these minds, we find a striking commonality in their
descriptions, even if we civilians can’t quite understand what in the world
(or out of it) they’re talking about.
According to scholars of mysticism, these shared traits generally
include a vision of unity in which all things, including the self, are
subsumed (expressed in the phrase “All is one”); a sense of certainty
about what one has perceived (“Knowledge has been revealed to me”);
feelings of joy, blessedness, and satisfaction; a transcendence of the
categories we rely on to organize the world, such as time and space or self
and other; a sense that whatever has been apprehended is somehow
sacred (Wordsworth: “Something far more deeply interfused” with
meaning) and often paradoxical (so while the self may vanish, awareness
abides). Last is the conviction that the experience is ineffable, even as
thousands of words are expended in the attempt to communicate its
power. (Guilty.)
Before my journeys, words and phrases such as these left me cold; they
seemed utterly opaque, so much quasi-religious mumbo jumbo. Now they
paint a recognizable reality. Likewise, certain mystical passages from
literature that once seemed so overstated and abstract that I read them
indulgently (if at all), now I can read as a subspecies of journalism. Here
are three nineteenth-century examples, but you can find them in any
century.
Ralph Waldo Emerson crossing a wintry New England commons in
“Nature”:
Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe
air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism
vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see
all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me;
I am part or particle of God.Or Walt Whitman, in the early lines of the first (much briefer and
more mystical) edition of Leaves of Grass: