The Mystic Sense

To get around Osaka, I've been doing a lot of bicycling, on a cheap secondhand bike I picked up in my local shotengai. The city is good cycling territory, no steep hills, bike lanes on most of the sidewalks. Everybody has a bike here -- it's not uncommon to see a housewife with two small kids and a load of groceries balanced on her shopping bicycle, or a young man peddling along with his girlfriend sitting behind him on his bike's cargo rack. (The down side is that bicycle theft is also surprisingly common -- this is my second bike.)

The great thing about biking is that it's brought me right up close to the everyday beauty of the city. Tonight, heading downtown to sit in a bar and write, I had just such a moment as I was waiting at the crosswalk near the bridge by the Osaka Dome. A man about my age, perhaps a few years younger, ordinary guy in khaki windbreaker holding hands on either side with his daughters, maybe six and eight years old. And the daughters were on unicycles! Unicycles, one pink, one yellow, white tires; the girls in matching outfits (unicycle team outfits? or just kawaii?): blue jeans with multi-colored star patches low on the legs, pink sweatshirts, white puffy parka-type vest over top.

Me with a big smile, trying not to stare; the girls sneaking looks at the funny-looking long-haired gaijin. All beautiful.

All of us have some sort of aesthetic sense, a sense of beauty, the ability to be moved and exalted by certain situations and experiences, both of the senses and of the intellect. What triggers it may be as varied as Van Gough's "Starry Night", or Cantor's diagonalization argument about the infinity of the reals versus the infinity of rational numbers, or the Ramones classic punk anthem "Blitzkrieg Bop", or an encounter with little Japanese girls on unicycles. But every human being of sound mind possesses the ability to experience beauty in some sights, sounds, words, and situations. We would hold a person without this ability to be damaged, lacking, an object of pity.

One specific, wonderfully deep type of beauty comes not from the agreeability of our concrete sensory perceptions (such as found in music or visual arts), nor from the relationship of abstract ideas to each other (the beauty found in mathematics and in some sorts of literature), but is found in the perception of a relationship between our immediate subjective experience and the broader world.

We call this sort of beauty "mystic". As, for example, D.H. Lawrence wrote (in a poem titled, simply, "Mystic"):

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.

The experience of the mystical is sometimes expressed as the sense of "the presence of the divine", sometimes as an experience of "Cosmic Consciousness", sometimes as "the perception of emptiness" or a "feeling of oneness with the universe", or as "no-mind", all depending on the social conditioning and religious training of the experiencer. But these are all expressions of the mystical sense, just as things as varied as the beauty of a birdsong, a Bach fugue, or a heavy metal drum solo are all perceptions of the aesthetic sense applied to music.

The mystical experience can result from experiences of sensory beauty, but it can also be triggered by experiences that would otherwise be unpleasant, or by completely ordinary events. It is an experience of existence rather than of meaning, of immediate and direct connection rather than evaluation or discrimination.

Until relatively recently, Western societies regarded the mystical sense as the province of a few -- those who had any sort of mystical experience were sent off to the seminary, monastery, or convent, safely isolating their contagion of our ordinary consciousness. But in the past century or so, an increased interest in Eastern spirituality and in pre-Chrisitian religious practices in the West, began to wear away this belief that the mystical sense was a rare possession. And the notion was pretty much destroyed by the introduction of psychedelic drugs to the mainstream in the middle of the twentieth century. Suddenly, with the ingestion of a few hundred micrograms of LSD, housewives and investment bankers and thoroughly ordinary, boring people were "seeing the face of God".

(Two notes here. One, this is not a suggestion to go drop acid at random. Two, as I write this I am listening to a woman sing "House of the Rising Sun" with Nihongo lyrics at "Folk Jamboree Night" at a bar called The Cellar in Osaka -- in a world full of things as extraordinary as little girls on unicycles waiting at the crosswalk, and Japanese folk singers who cover old American blues tunes, are drugs really necessary? More and more, I see why Taoist masters of old used to hang out in inns to spring mystical tricks on travelers far from home, open to new and crazy truths.)

But it is important to understand that the expression of the mystical sense is heavily conditioned by culture. A Christian sees Jesus, a Hindu sees Krishna; the danger in this is that each then concludes that all the associated dogma they've been taught is therefore true, when in fact the dogma and conditioning have only provided a filter for their experience, have determined what color glasses they are wearing when they behold the Clear Light.

With practice, we can develop this sense, and even manage to perceive the mystical experience from multiple perspectives, to swap the glasses for a couple different colors. This is one of the goals of ceremonial magic, as practiced by occultists and Pagans.

Is it worthwhile to have these experiences?

Is it worthwhile to view beautiful art, or hear beautiful music, or to fall in love? we might as well ask. The experience is its own justification.

But the danger of dogma, of mistaking these wonderful subjective experiences as being indicative of truth about the "objective" universe (or at least "consensual reality", if one questions the notion of objectivity), is not to be taken lightly. Therefore the practice must include grounding, good solid smacks upside the head (figurative or literal) if the seeker becomes too attached to the fantastic.

This is why Zen masters carry a stick, and say things like "If you say this is a stick, I will hit you thirty times, and if you say it is not, I will hit you thirty times!" Attachment to the fantastic is rejected just as much as attachment to the mundane. The Pagan community is developing its own safeguards, primarily in the form of sacred nonsense. Rather than a stick, Discordian[*1] teachers carry a joy buzzer, and The Church of the SubGenius will empty your wallet[*2], but the spirit is the same.

[*1 Did you know God is a crazy woman named Eris? www.PrincipiaDiscordia.com]

[*2 Eternal salvation or triple your money back! www.subgenius.com ]

Not too much can be said directly about the mystical experience. By its nature it is not well-expressed in words, and attempting to do so is what tends to the establishment of dogma.

A classic Zen koan from Kyogen asks us to imagine a men hanging from a high tree branch by his teeth. He can't reach any hold by his hands or his feet. Along comes a seeker who asks, "Why did Bodhidharma (the founder of Zen) come from the West?" In Zen language, this means "Please teach me about Buddhism". If he opens his mouth to answer, he falls (some versions say he falls straight to hell); if he remains silent, he fails in his duty to aid the querent (and thus, some versions say, will be killed and dammed).

What should he do?

Fortunately, I am not hanging from a tree. As a writer, I can pass the buck to someone else, so let's take a look at what one leading mystic, the Shakyamuni Buddha, taught.