Part 2 in the series, A Literary Search for Meaning by Dr Karen Hughes
Whether couched in religious or humanist terms, it is the individual journey of the seeker that characterises modern Western spirituality. According to Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, modern spiritual seekers value self-expression, authenticity and “maximising subjective wellbeing”, and this has given rise to a “holistic milieu” where people seek the sacred within, preferring personal experience and discovery over traditional faith (79). Seekers are no longer content with the authoritative God talk and simple faith of previous generations (Tacey, “JMS”). Instead, there is a yearning for direct experiences that will ultimately lead to a deeper understanding of the human condition.
The search for meaning through personal experience has led to a renewed interest in mystical ideas, beliefs, practices and symbols and these now form part of an evolving occulture or spiritual warehouse available to the modern spiritual seeker through various means, including popular literature and music (Partridge Re-Enchantment 1: ch. 6). This occulture draws from a wide array of traditions, including shamanism, paganism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christian mysticism. Partridge, like many other scholars, argues that popular culture has a “significant formative effect on society” and is a key sacralising factor with an influential role in disseminating modern spiritual ideas (1: 119). The human mind, it seems, has its limitations, and rational thought, with all its unconscious assumptions and constraints, is unlikely to reveal the deeper meaning of human existence. By contrast, artistic works which draw on popular occulture to awaken sensations of awe, wonder and dread might offer the seeker a glimpse of the spiritual wisdom that mystics, philosophers and poets have sought throughout the ages.
The mystical experience has been the subject of Western academic interest at least since the pioneering work of W. R. Inge in 1899, gaining momentum with the publications of William James in 1902, Rudolph Otto in 1923, and Abraham Maslow in 1964. “Mystical” has long been defined in an adjectival sense as relating to mystics or religious mysticism, or as inspiring a sense of spiritual mystery, awe and fascination. While the first definition carries a long history across a range of traditions, it is not a description that fits well with the modern spiritual seeker. Historically, most mystics were conservative, conforming to the scriptures and doctrines of their specific traditions. Today, spiritual seekers adopt an eclectic range of rituals and techniques, searching for experiences without the dogma, restriction and commitment of traditional religion (Ferrer, “Embodied Spirituality”). The second definition—inspiring a sense of spiritual mystery, awe and fascination—relies on the sensation evoked by the experience and is more relevant for the purposes of this discussion.
William James approaches his subject from an epistemic, pragmatic position, examining “distinctive allegedly knowledge-granting” mystical experiences rather than the ongoing practice of mysticism (Gellman). While this approach has been criticised as masculine and reductionist, it is a useful starting point to examine the nature of such experiences. James is interested in “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (W. James 31). He uses four key factors to describe the personal mystical experience: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity. F. C. Happold expands James’s list to seven, adding consciousness of the oneness of everything, timelessness, and the sense of an encounter with the “true self” (46–47). Building on this epistemological approach, modern philosophers have defined the mystical experience as “a (purportedly) super sense-perceptual or sub sense-perceptual unitive experience granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not accessible by way of sense-perception, somatosensory modalities, or standard introspection” (Gellman).
Like James and Happold, psychologist Abraham Maslow separates mystical experiences from religious tradition and examines them from a more individualistic perspective. Maslow uses the term “peak experiences” to describe “mystical” or “magical” experiences or “states of flow” that lead to spiritual awakening and “self-actualisation”—the highest level of psychological development in which an individual is driven to fulfil his full human potential (Religions). Maslow observes that while his patients described their experiences in the same words as the great mystics, these experiences had many triggers—music, love, place, and so on. The more “psychologically healthy” and “self-actualised” a patient was, the more knowledge and meaning they gleaned from the experience and the less likely they were to try to analyse or explain it (Interview). Maslow has been repudiated for using the terms “peak” and “mystical” interchangeably by scholars who argue that a mystical experience is traditionally more religious than psychological and must include a sense of oneness with—or at least some awareness of—the divine (see, for example, May). Maslow appears to acknowledge this distinction, however, with what he calls the “high plateau-experience”:
[A]serene and calm rather than a poignantly emotional, climactic, autonomic response to the miraculous, the awesome, the sacralized … So far as I can now tell, the high plateau-experience always has a noetic and cognitive element, which is not always true for peak experiences, which can be purely and exclusively emotional (Religions, Preface).
This is closer to the psychological approach taken by Evelyn Underhill, who dismisses James’s factors for a more intuitive analysis (Mysticism 81). Unlike James, who acknowledges that his work is purely theoretical, Underhill writes that her experience of mysticism is practical, involves total self-loss and reintegration and, even during the times of struggle that she calls “the Dark Night of the Soul”, is essentially about love (443). For Underhill, the result of following the mystic path is the transcendence of the ego and union with God, leading the seeker to a unitive life of creativity and purpose (174).
Rudolph Otto claims that all mystical experience is based on a feeling of the “numinous”, a word derived from the Latin noun numen meaning “divine power”. The numinous is a “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self” (Idea of the Holy 6). It is a living force that evokes an urgent and overpowering sensation of both fascination and dread (16). The numinous “cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes of the spirit must be awakened” (7). It arises from the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which can be roughly translated as “the mysterious presence of the wholly other that inspires awe and devotion” (ch. IV). Despite varying criticisms of this description, including those by scholars who see the numinous as universalist, androcentric, dualist or too limited in its scope (Gellman, citing Daly and Goldenberg), it is a useful term for describing the sense of wonder, awe and the uncanny evoked by the lyrical writing, mystical themes and mythic tropes that distinguish the works of speculative fiction I will examine in later articles.
The exploratory nature of the modern spiritual quest reflects an emerging social trend to question definitive proclamations of universal truth (Murray 131, citing Habermas, Russell, Lakoff, Bhaskar, Wilber et al.). All human knowledge is fallible and even the great sages and mystics cannot lay claim to any “ultimate reality”. Instead, “believing, advocating, doubting and inquiring” is central to the spiritual journey (171). As theologian Paul Tillich writes, “If God is alive, our experience of the sacred is going to be uncertain, creative, imprecise and full of surprise and astonishment. Mysterious, unknowable, unable to be contained and captured” (56). The optimal emotional state for the modern seeker might therefore be best summed up by the poet John Keats, who coined the phrase “negative capability” to describe the wisdom in “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (72).
Ferrer, Jorge N. “Embodied Spirituality, Now and Then.” Kosmos Journal, fall|winter 2012, pp. 58-62.
Gellman, Jerome. “Mysticism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2019 ed.
Happold, F. C. Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology. 3rd ed. Penguin Books; Revised ed., 15 Feb. 1991.
Heelas, Paul, and Linda Woodhead. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902. Mentor, 1958.
Keats, John. “To George and Thomas Keats, Sunday 21 Dec. 1817.” The Letters of John Keats (1816-1820). Oxford University Press, 1947.
May, Robert M. Cosmic Consciousness Revisited: The Modern Origins and Development of a Western Spiritual Psychology. Diane Publishing, 1991.
Maslow, Abraham H. Interview.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DOKZzbuJQA,1994.
—. Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. Ohio State UP, 1964.
Murray, Tom. “Knowing and Unknowing Reality.” Integral Review, vol. 15, no. 1, Jan. 2019.
Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy. 1923. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 1950.
Partridge, Christopher Hugh. The Re-Enchantment of the West. T&T Clark International, vol. 1, 2004, and vol. 2, 2005.
Tacey, David. “JMS 2015: David Tacey, Aboriginal Cosmology and Spiritual Renewal.” (Online seminar).
Tillich, Paul. The Shaking of the Foundations. 1949. Harmondsworth, 1963.
Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. 1911. Image Classic, 1990.