That art Thou

Mysticism tends to arrive at a truth so ordinary it has now become a cliche. This truth is summed up in Advaita Vedanta’s ancient proverb of non-dualism: that art thou. We may find its like anywhere from Tibetan Buddhism, to Zen, to the Dionysian mystery cults, to Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, the Neo Platonists, the Dao, the desert mystics, Borges, Kabbalah, and psychonautica. This mystical truth, in a nutshell, is that you are the universe: there is no separation between yourself and the divine cosmos; what is most transcendent is most immanent: brahman is atman. But this feeling of cosmic oneness is now a wellness cliché of corporate branding.  And yet according to these mystical traditions it is a truth kept hidden from the ego and the world. It is no intellectual truth, nor any religious one; it cannot be arrived at by thinking, nor by belief. This is an embodied and felt truth; a peculiar and unique kind of awareness, it is non-representational and must be experienced. The force of this truth is precisely the loss of your ego. Easier said than done. So mysticism is typically an ascetic practice. In order to disable the ego one must put in the work: fasting, meditating, not sleeping, living in a cave for 40 days, living on top of a pole, ultramarathons, 5 grams of mushrooms in silent darkness and so on. While science and modernity has disparaged this kind of non-egoic knowing, psychoanalysis may be regarded as a restoration of the far older mystical program. The work of the treatment, in the attempt to speak the unspeakable, is also ascetic and non-egoic: one speaks in spite of the ego and in the face of the world. Saying everything, like the mystical, is a limit experience; the truth of the clinic emerges from the bleeding edge of the universe—which is the body itself. From this view psychoanalysis is an ordinary mysticism.