Visits to the Real
The Tao Te Ching treats mystical experience with glib formality: “those who talk do not know, those who know do not talk.” In other words, mystical experience, like sex, drugs and car wrecks, can only be experienced. Since I am talking about it right now on this blog, everything that follows is suspect. Anyways, the intersection of sex and mystical practice is called the left-hand path; and everyone knows that William James cooked up a fair working definition of mystical experience by taking nitrous oxide. But while you may have a PhD in nitrous oxide, you won’t really know what it’s like until you do it. This is what we mean by mystical experience, no amount of reading can get you there. And yet, it would seem that such experience does not happen in a vacuum. That is, paradoxically, what you may find meaningful way out there beyond the limit is contingent upon what you bring with. Christianity, among other religions, typically wants to own the mystical as an objective reality, having decided in advance what it means—glory and angels, blinding light, the presence of God and so on—on the contrary, the mystical, by which we mean the Real (where the binary objective/subjective no longer applies) is that point furthest from any theology or creed, even while it is probably beneficial to have a creed whilst taking a dip in that livid alien sea. This is what psychedelia means by the set in set and setting. It is probably the case that this creed or position or state of mind is necessary for your ability to even return to the daylit realms of relative sanity—see for instance the golden bough; even the hero Aeneas required a psychopomp to visit the underworld. The line between mystical and psychotic experience is tbd and there is a minimal reflexive twist between radical truth and undifferentiated chaos—or are they the same thing? The creed here at spacewhy is one of unknowing: what is out there beyond the limit? While there are many tales, there’s no telling. And yet, we’ve all been born there, and verily—sooner or later—will go there once more.
Millenium Triptych, 1982, Ingo Swann
(to add yet more confusion to what i’m talking about, I mean a certain kind of mystical experience, a transitory ecstatic state—a visit, or trip—perhaps indistinguishable from madness—see Plato’s telestic madness—and that differs from that mystical state that is continual or that resides on a spectrum, oscillating day to day. Obviously we can imagine a person who lives a functional life, as it were, on or past the limit all the time, and so invalidates or problematizes there being a limit at all. The last thing I wish to presume is human experience. As Freud said of the oceanic feeling—a continual state by the by: “It is very difficult for me to work with these almost intangible quantities”)
