They can be seen as concentrating, in particular, in a set of practices which can be
described as ‘mystical’. Like practices of contemplation, with which they are
intimately linked, they can be seen as the result of a number of overlapping
processes of animation and play which allow forces and intensities to be focused
and channelled: it is stimulation that produces tranquility and it is stimulation that
produces trance.
First, then, there is the importance of various forms of mystical communication,
mental and physical techniques that ‘fix the conditions of possibility of an
encounter or dialogue with the other (method of prayer, meditation, concentra-
tion)’ (de Certeau 1992: 5). Current forms of practice have a long genealogy in
Western cultures and stem from traditions as different as the Christian (both
Anglican and Catholic), the nature mysticisms of Romanticism as found in various
forms of the sublime, the numerous forms of Eastern thinking which have been
imported into the West, especially in the nineteenth century, and the cathartic
elements of many types of performance. More recently, there has been the growth
of New Age religions, nearly all of which contain an explicitly mystical component
(for example, following on from sources as diverse as the writings of Gurdjieff
or Hopi Indian practices). Not least, in all these traditions can be found, to a
greater or lesser degree, an approach to nature as both the focus and the object
of mystical energies. For example, New Age thinking often stresses grids of power
like ley lines, nature goddesses and the like, as well as the importance of particular
sites as magical territories able to conjure up communication with the other.
This brings us to the second process, the importance of ritual, understood as
practices which offer a heightened sense of involvement in our involvements
through various performative technologies (Hughes-Freeland 1998; Schechner
1993). There may actually have been a multiplication of these performative spaces
of affirmation, in which mystical experiences can be brought forth and animated
through the power of body postures, repetitive movements, schedules of recall
and spatial juxtapositions. Western societies have evolved more and more bodily
practices which are a means of amplifying passions and producing ‘oceanic’
experiences: music, dance, theatre, mime, art and so on, which very large numbers
of the population participate in; rather more than is often thought (see, for
example, Finnegan 1989). These practices have at least the potential to provide
mystical experiences^8 – the trance state of some kinds of dance (Malbon 1999),
the ‘high’ of listening to a piece of music, and so on.^9
Last, but not least, there has been the rise of varying forms of body therapy,
which, though they often rest on various psychological and psychiatric principles,
have quite clear links not only to contemplative but to mystical body practice.
These are the various forms of dance therapy (e.g. Roth 1998), music therapy,
massage therapy, variants of bioenergetics (e.g. Lowen 19 7 5), autogenic ther-
apy, body–mind centring, and so on, which try to harness and work with emotional
energy on the grounds that movement causes emotion, rather than vice versa.
These body practices again allow the present to be intensified since they produce
both an intensified sense of body movement and, at the same time, focus and
enhance that movement. They are tempos of involvement without any necessary
66 Part I