What is mysticism?

Home - Quora Link

Mysticism is the creation, nurturing, and exploration of a place in the mind dedicated to exploring what mystics like to call, “the mystery.” Defining the mystery gets a little tricky because there are two basic approaches to looking at it that essentially boil down to internal and external, and people that look at it one way often don’t see the validity of the other way.

Internal and external are how I describe the basic difference between Western and Eastern spirituality. Western spirituality tends to focus on something external to the self, whether it’s God, or more often these days, money. I keed, I keed. Eastern spirituality tends to focus less on what’s going on ‘out there’ and more on what’s going on inside. Christians pray to God, Buddhists meditate inward. There is more to Eastern spirituality than Buddhism, but for simplicity’s sake I’m just going to deal with Buddhism as it’s the purest manifestation of internally-focused religion.

Naturally it’s not a perfect distinction but the reasons Westerners and Easterners get attracted to each other’s religions for tend to revolve around that basic dichotomy. Westerners turning away from Christianity tend to think Buddhism is a purer way of going about it, because it doesn’t involve all these weird dogmatic beliefs. Easterners are typically interested in the community that Christianity uniquely offers.

Mysticism is the direct exploration of one’s spiritual beliefs, whatever they may be. Praying to God counts. Meditating on the ephemerality of self counts. Weird as it may seem, daydreaming about science fiction also counts.

What these things all have in common is the aforementioned place in the mind where people go when they want to explore it. It’s something we can all feel, a connection to a source that for many of us, provides the highest meaning we can obtain in life. People who dedicate their lives to this connection, often times call themselves mystics.

So what is meant by “direct exploration?” Well, that really depends on your beliefs and your basic orientation, internal or external. Internal-types tend to think of meditation and prayer. External types look to what’s called a ‘leap of faith’.

Meditation / prayer, at it’s core essence, is about removing the mind from the mundane state it typically resides. This is why daydreaming counts, you’re not in a mundane state anymore and mind is free to wander about and explore things. Ordinary dreams are, well, ordinary, so they don’t count, though it’s certainly possible to look for spiritual meaning in them, which obviously counts.

The leap of faith is when you place your fate in the hands of the external thing your spirituality revolves around, commonly called God, and then by watching carefully what happens. One example from my life is I went through a period where I was doing a lot of meditation and exploration and I didn’t want to burden this part of my life with such mundane things as hunting for a job. So I ‘made a deal’ where I’d just keep doing it until I ran out of money, and expected a ‘path’ to material success to just show up for me. If it didn’t come then I had solid evidence saying that this stuff was all just silly. I set a deadline and got on with it.

The deadline came and went and the path I was hoping for never appeared. I tried refocusing away from spiritual exploration but instead found that I could integrate ever more intense spiritual exploration and a normal life together. I didn’t have to separate the two after all. I started a career and life has been amazing ever since. The leap of faith forces both you and your beliefs to sink or swim. They almost never work out exactly the way you want them to, but they usually turn out to make your life immeasurably better anyway. The utter dejection I felt when I realized I wasn’t going to get what I wanted from spirituality was more than matched by the amazement I would feel later at how it all turned out in the end.

Christians, due to their external orientation on a God that is unimaginably bigger than they are, find leaps of faith much much much easier to make than Buddhists, who tend to think more in terms of personal surrender when they make leaps of faith. Enlightenment is a scary thing when you think about it, it can be as awe-inspiring as God is to Christians. It’s commonly said that people who suddenly become enlightened often do not survive the experience. Deciding to chase enlightenment, despite the risk, the need, the demand, to sacrifice the self, is a classic leap of faith, and provokes the same kind of intense experience.

It’s precisely this intense experience that defines mysticism, the nurturing and harvesting of the garden in the mind where you keep your spirituality.