Experiencing the hidden
Because mystics experience spiritual phenomena that are hidden from the senses, the physical world disclosed by sense perception does not exhaust reality as mystics understand it. Some mystics find the spiritual to be immanent within the world of ordinary sense perception, but others discount the perceptible world as illusion and attribute reality to the spiritual alone. Whatever the precise detail of the relation of the extrasensory to the perceptible, the hiddenness of the spiritual is an important characteristic of mysticism.
Many mystics claim that their experiences are indescribable in human language. Language can refer to experiences, as a kind of notational shorthand that enables other people who have had similar experiences to understand approximately what is meant, but it can never convey the whole content of an experience.
Not only do mystics feel that they have experienced a hidden dimension of reality, they generally seek to conform with it. For Confucians, conformance with the Dao traditionally consisted of implementing it in the administration of government. For Western rational mystics, conformance with nous took the form of pursuing philosophical knowledge and, in some cases, its technological implementation, as in medicine or alchemy. For most of the world’s mystics, however, conformance with reality’s hidden dimension is achieved through its imitation. Many Hindu Yogis, Buddhist meditators, and Christian mystics have attempted, so far as possible, to be exclusively spiritual, abstaining from material possessions and the satisfaction of bodily needs and withdrawing from human society and the entire world of physical existence. Other approaches, however, are less extreme.
Claims of indescribability differ from claims of inexplicable paradox. Unitive experiences frequently inspire mystics to assert a paradox, such as the claim that all is one, that being is nothingness, or that masculinity and femininity are the same thing. The analytic psychologist Carl Jung suggested the term mysterium coniunctionis (Latin: “mystery of the conjunction”) as a designation for mystical paradoxes. Mystics who conceptualize a mysterium coniunctionis—and not all do so—find it difficult to express the paradox in words, both in their own thoughts and in interpersonal communications. Words permit one to arrive at the paradox. For example, the statement “A and B are one” uses the nonparadoxical concepts “A,” “B,” and “one.” Each of the nonparadoxical concepts can be explained separately. However, the concepts are juxtaposed in such a way that the sentence as a whole arrives at a concept of “one” that is not its customary meaning, and it can be extremely difficult to find words that express the paradox at greater length by articulating nuances, implications, corollaries, and so forth.
The practice of secrecy
Because mystics experience spiritual phenomena that are hidden from the senses, they often conform with the secrecy of the spiritual by being secretive themselves. Some mystics retreat into silence. Some preserve secrecy about their ecstatic experiences but speak openly about their mystical ideas and beliefs. Others are still less secretive, withholding, for example, only a certain technique by which alternate states of consciousness are attained, such as a doctrine, a chant, or a spiritual name. In many Native American cultures, people were expected to seek visions in order to encounter a guardian spirit who would bestow a song or name by which a lesser spirit could be acquired as a helper. The song or name was kept secret, so that no one else would have access to the power it conferred, and in most cases the contents of the vision were reported only to the person who taught the visionary. In this manner the hiddenness of the spiritual was imitated by the visionaries and their communities. In several traditional African cultures, boys approaching puberty were taken from their villages into the forest, where they lived in a boys’ village for as long as two or three years. During this period, they were taught secret lore and underwent the ritual induction of a mystical experience through the administration of a psychoactive drug. Following initiation, the youths returned to the communal villages and outwardly carried on as though no secrets existed.
In many other cultures, people undergo initiation into secret societies through mystical practice. In other cases, initiation into a mystical practice defines a social class. For example, a successful vision quest was a condition of male eligibility to join a hunting party in many Native American cultures. Elsewhere, initiations were key to participation in warriors’ groups and militias and in occasional trades, such as iron smithing. In Classical Greece and the Hellenistic world, rites of initiation were undergone for the sake of having mystical experiences and gaining knowledge of the mysteries. Secret societies, often with political agendas, have been a major feature of Daoism for nearly 2,000 years and have been characteristic of Western esotericism since the Renaissance.
Mystics in many cultural traditions maintain secrets by speaking and writing in coded languages that are not understood by the laity of the tradition. Shamans convey secret meanings to each other by using vocabularies that consist of archaic words and metaphors. Daoism similarly utilizes coded language, a fact that makes extensive parts of Daoist texts incomprehensible to noninitiates. The “intentional languages” of Hindu and Buddhist Tantric texts include vocabularies in the names of commonplace items that are intentionally used in secret ways to speak about visionary and mystical experiences. In his Seventh Letter, Plato asserted that his writings contain hints at secret teachings; and the Babylonian Talmud, a compilation of Jewish teachings and commentaries, instructs that Jewish mysticism is to be taught by means of “chapter headings” alone. The symbolae (“symbols”) of the Pythagoreans, the ciphers of Western alchemists, the taʾwil (allegorical interpretations) of Sufi mystics, and the Kabbalists’ exegetical technique of sod (“secret”) are further developments of the practice of coded languages among Western mystics.
Secrecy may also have ethical consequences. In Hinduism, Buddhism, and the early-Christian gnostic movement, mystical secrecy includes the devaluing of phenomenological reality as “unreal.” The divine is seen as a keeper of secrets, who deceives and makes sport of humanity, condemning it to suffering through ignorance. In other mystical systems, perceptible reality is regarded not as a deception but as a code that a mystic may learn. Syrian Christian mysticism regards physical phenomena as symbols of higher spiritual realities. The Neoplatonic tradition, which undergirds Sufism, the Kabbala, and Western esotericism, regards physical phenomena as lower manifestations of realities that are spiritual at higher levels of being. In the 16th century the Dutch mystic Jakob Böhme wrote of “the signature of all things.” The correspondence of the cosmos with the human body in both Daoism and Tantric mysticism permits both orders of reality to be coded in terms of the gods, the landscape, the elements, various mineral and vegetable substances, and so forth.
