“Is Mysticism a State of Mind or is it an Experience?”

A friend of mine, Stephen, recently asked this question: “Is mysticism a state of mind, or is it an experience?” What follows is my attempt at answering his question:

Loosely speaking, it’s both, Stephen — assuming that I’ve properly understood your question. That is, a “state of mind” is presumably the required basis for an experience; and if that’s true, then you can’t have the one without having the other.

Yet, that raises an interesting question, doesn’t it? Are there actual “states of mind”?

Please allow me to suggest that the mind can be thought of as a process, rather than as a state. If so, then what we think of as “states of mind” would be our memory of our mind at a given moment.

In a way, our memory of our mind at a given moment would be like taking a snapshot of a child. The snapshot freezes the child in time and place — creating the illusion of a state. But in actuality, the child is always on the run, so to speak — changing, growing, developing. So too, the mind always seems to be on the run, doesn’t it? Never so much stopping as merely pausing. Much more a process than a state.

Like any process, the mind can be interrupted. And mystics claim to have empirically discovered that when the mind is interrupted, the content of experience changes radically. So radically, in fact, that it is beyond the ability of words to adequately express what is then experienced. That, then, is the mystical experience.

May I take this a step further than the scope of your question? You see, we can ask a simple question here. Who or what does the experiencing when the mind is interrupted and the mystical experience occurs? For normally, when our mind is at work, we tend to think it (i.e. our mind, our conscious awareness, our consciousness, our self, our ego, our “I”) experiences the world. But when the mind ceases, then who or what does the experiencing?

Of course, one answer is the organism, the individual, the body, the senses and the brain, are still experiencing even though the mind has ceased and is no longer experiencing. Put differently, mystics discovered what might be called “pre-conscious thought or awareness” long before Freud and others invented the subconscious. The subconscious mind of psychoanalysis, however, absolutely pales when compared to the mystical experience or awareness that mystics the world over have encountered and reported.

I would submit here that mystics long ago empirically demonstrated human awareness encompasses far more than conscious awareness or consciousness — what we typically call “the mind”.