All around the world there are mystics. In every grove and alley, in every village, city, and mountain cave.
Not all religious communities embrace their neighborhood mystics. In some parts of the world, mystics are instead shunned, ridiculed, or slurred as ‘hermit’, ‘madman’, or ‘eccentric.’
It turns out that these mystics and madmen might be the most religious of all. In fact, if it isn't mystical, it might not even be truly spiritual or religious. That's at least the conclusion MIT luminary Huston Smith came to, shortly before his death, in one of his prodigious studies of the world's great religions and their adherents.
Mysticism is where the juice is, he found, and while mystics explore profound aspects of reality, the thing called “religion” is for the rest of us. In his travels documenting the role religion plays in Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist societies, Smith found that religions played very similar roles in general in the societies he visited.
For most adherents -- across all the major faiths -- religion is primarily a social activity. This vast majority of adherents of religions experience their faith essentially as a series of activities where they interact with each other, host parties, ask a divine force or being for welfare and safety for their families, and undergo periodic life rituals according to traditions and codes of behavior. Religion for nearly everyone is a social organizing activity, something that tells you who your friends are -- or gives you friends if you don't have them -- and delineates who the moral and immoral people are.
On the other hand, Smith found that across all religions, some 2-5% of adherents could be defined as "mystics." These people are driven by unrelenting curiosity or by devotion to prayer, meditation, renunciation, or dedication -- to experience a direct connection with God or god or Allah or the Tao.
Be it devotees of the Kabbalah, whirling dervishes of the Sufi sect, or solitary Taoist monks, to the mystical adherents, understanding and refining the deepest truths available to their means of perception and to their deities is more important than attaining social opprobrium in their community.
The Core of the Mystical Experience
While it's striking that such a similar percentage of each religion’s adherents are drawn to the mystical rather than just the social aspects of their religion, an even more intriguing discovery is that mystics might share more with each other than they do with the “social” adherents of their religion.
Could a Jewish mystic share more in overall spiritual experience with a mystical Buddhist than with everyday members of his community at the Synagogue? Could a Christian mystic share more with a Muslim mystic than with those in her own Church?
An American researcher named Walter Stace identified eight shared experiences that nearly all mystics whom he spoke with across religious traditions shared:
Ego loss
Timelessness and spacelessness
Total unity with all things
Inner subjectivity (a sense that everything in the universe is conscious or aware)
Positive affect and beneficence
Sacredness
Noetic quality (a feeling of greater knowledge of the cosmos)
Ineffability (the sense that the experience cannot be described with language)
Stace theorized that these comprise the core universal qualities of mystical experience. It doesn’t take careful comparison to notice that these are distinctly different from the common experiences that social adherents of religion share. The two sets of experiences are utterly different.
Still, that’s not to make the bold suggestion that a contemplative Hindu and a Taoist meditator experience oneness with their gods the same way.
To delve into that fascinating question, a recent joint study by a Chinese university and an American one asked exactly this question of Tibetan Buddhists and compared the answers with those Stace obtained in his studies: Do Tibetan Buddhists and Protestant Christian monks experience the same thing when they have a mystical experience? Professors Hood, Watson, Chen, and Yang sought through their joint research to understand whether mystics share not only their place in their respective religious societies around the world, but also the actual experiences that they call mystical.
To their surprise, the professors discovered that yes, indeed, Tibetan Buddhists recount their mystical experiences with extraordinarily similar descriptions of timelessness, sudden oneness with the universe, and warm profound sense of vast beneficence of the universe, as well as ineffability.
The study didn’t stop there. The professors sought to quantify the commonality of the mystics’ experiences, and here they found that although the monks described their experiences very similarly, nevertheless they assigned the experiences different meaning.
This suggests that while mystics of different religions might attain nearly identical mystical states, still they might not experience the same thing because of what they tell themselves the experiences mean. A Tibetan Buddhist’s cosmology, language, and understanding of history are so different from an American Christian’s that they might interpret an identical mystical experience (once it’s over) as part of their respective spiritual paths.
So do mystics share more with each other than with those in their own church, temple, or mosque? It seems the answer is both yes and no. They share the context of language, tradition, cosmology, and history with their religious community; they share the profundity of their mystical experiences only with other mystics around the world.
What is equally fascinating to contemplate is that regardless of one’s religious affiliation, mystical experiences promise all of us not just profound insight into the nature of the universe but also wordless states of consciousness that we can share with other humans around this miraculous world.