Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

What on Earth Is Mysticism?
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

I. Various Worlds: Modern and Postmodern

Our religious movement has had some highly distinguished critics. The brilliant Anglican poet, W H Auden, for example, once observed tartly that Unitarians were those odd churchgoers who believed in one God at most. A keen critic! He is quite right. That is an accurate description of our theology. One God at most.

Not only that, UUs have little enthusiasm for the act of believing itself as the way to find answers to life's questions. Understanding matters far more to us than believing. We are an unusual religious movement.

And we have, I think, a significant mission because of our origin. We developed in history, not in the ancient world, but during the period known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, that ferment of thought and action in the 18th century, one of the fruits of which was the US Constitution. Another of which was modern science. The result is that as a religious movement we tend to be in harmony with reason, science, and democracy. And with something more.

Mysticism is the "something more" that UU religion contains. In combination with our affection for reason, science, and democracy, mysticism can make a major contribution to the development of the postmodern world view humanity now urgently requires.

Mysticism has been an element in our movement for many years, but in the 20th century it has been largely eclipsed by the remarkable achievements of reason, science, and technology. A majority of UUs are now uneasy or hostile or baffled in the presence of mysticism. This is regrettable, and is owing to confusion about its actual nature.

Science, to be sure, is a remarkably rich source of understanding. It has enabled humanity in the 20th century to advance swiftly in knowledge, in wealth, in productivity, in power, in population.

However, there is now a growing awareness in the upper levels of both science and religion that the modern world view, in which science is a primary component, has brought us to the brink of self-destruction by nuclear war, as well as to massive pollution of the environment which supports our lives: the air we breathe, the water we drink; the land, the sea, and even the upper atmosphere. Chemicals, radiation, pollution. Over-population.

The modern world view, with all its manifest merits, has carried us in the direction of extinction. It is becoming exquisitely clear to those on the frontiers of thought that we must now move to create a postmodern world view if human life is to survive and move toward a higher and more harmonious, less destructive level of existence.

After restudying the history of UU religion, it became apparent to me that our movement may well have an important contribution to make here. I have come to see that UU religion as a whole is essentially a rational mysticism. Rational mysticism? Isn't that self-contradictory? Let's take a fresh look at the matter, and see what we can see.

II. What Being Rational Means

What does it mean to be rational? It is important to be clear about this because it is now the dominant characteristic of UU religion. Ours is a rational religion. The exercise of reason has in the 20th century absorbed our attention and energy almost totally; and this has been extraordinarily creative in many ways. Destructive and limiting in others.

To be rational is to be aware of all available evidence bearing on the issue we are considering, and then to use the mind in an orderly, logical, dispassionate manner in arriving at a conclusion. It means detaching ourselves from established conclusions, whether our own or others. It means suspending judgement, considering without prejudice the implications of the relevant evidence as it accumulates.

It means setting aside institutional authority, striving to see the world as it is, rather than only as we have been conditioned to think that it is. It means working toward an understanding of reality with detachment, without prejudice or preconception, allowing fresh insight to lead us to truth.

The rational approach to understanding the world is, of course, indispensable to humanity. It has enabled us to expand human awareness enormously, to enhance the quality of human life. But reason, though it is of immense importance, is not by itself sufficient to create a full and harmonious life. Something more is required. Like mysticism.

III. What Mysticism Isn't

Understanding mysticism is extremely difficult. This is not because it is so complex. It is, in fact, strikingly simple in structure. It is infinitely less complicated than Catholic or Protestant theology. What makes it so hard to grasp is that it is buried in confusion and misunderstanding. People approach mysticism with preconceptions and prejudices that cast a murky cloud over the phenomenon.

Mysticism is not concerned with the supernatural. Miracles are part of popular religion, not of mystical religion. God is not necessary to mysticism, though many mystics do describe their experience in terms of a relationship to God or Allah or Brahman. Buddha is an example of a major mystic who did not. Mysticism does not involve having visions or hearing voices. It has nothing to do with the occult, ghosts, extra-sensory perception or out-of-body experiences. It is not concerned with spiritualism or clairvoyance, telepathy or pre-cognition, though it is often muddled in many people's minds with these phenomena.

But aren't fundamentalists mystics? Not at all. They are fervent believers. Mystics have little enthusiasm for believing as the Way. As one mystic (Aldous Huxley) put it: "for the convinced believer, understanding or direct contact with reality is exceedingly difficult." For mystics it is understanding and "direct contact with reality" that matter above all. Fundamentalists are intense believers: their lives are defined by a system of traditional beliefs, not by mystical awareness.

Some of the confusion about mysticism is generated by the fact that the mystical experience is not at all intellectual. It is not rational. Not analytical. It is non-conceptual and non-verbal.

Well, for heaven's sake! If it is not rational, is it not necessarily worthless? This is an assumption many UUs fall into because of their overpowering affection for the rational mode of understanding, their thinking that rationality is the only true world view — the ultimate truth.

The word mysticism is badly abused. It has been used to cover a multitude of messy ideas. Hence, it has come to be identified in the minds of most UUs with words like misty, foggy, vague, fuzzy. In fact, mysticism is neither vague nor muddled nor misty. On the contrary, it possesses a jewel-like clarity. It is simple, uncluttered, direct. It is a direct experience of something of extraordinary significance.

IV. The Meaning of Mysticism

We have been looking at what mysticism is not. Now let's consider what it is. In the rational approach to the world we divide it into many parts (large and small): cells, molecules, teeth, toes, towns, beans, butter, birds, iron, oxygen, sand, sin, sunshine, soup, soap, parks, pants, poltergeist, poppies, and so on. We divide reality into discrete parts, and give each part a name, a handle by which we can hold it in our minds and manipulate it. Mystical awareness does just the reverse. And therein lies its value.

That is, from the perspective of mysticism, we apprehend the nature of things most fully when we set aside all concepts, all cultural conditioning, all verbal formulations, all beliefs, theology, philosophy, ideas, and develop a direct, non-verbal awareness of the world, others and ourselves as a unity, as one, as a living whole.

The mystical experience at its peak is an intense, sweeping awareness of the whole nature of things, and ourselves an inherent, inseparable part of it all. It is an experience of all that is as a meaningful whole. This is the core of the mystical mode of understanding.

It is a mode of synthesis, of integrating, unifying, making whole. Instead of grasping the world in our minds, as we typically do, by breaking it down into small parts, naming each part, the mystical mode puts it all together, nameless, including the self, into one vast, rich, unified whole, radiant with meaning.

Central to mysticism is an awareness that follows from the act of throwing off the limitations of merely verbalized truth, of socially accepted conceptions of the nature of things, and then making direct contact with what is, experiencing not words, not ideas only but the whole itself, as it comes to be contained within us, in our accumulated experience of it. It is an awareness (deep, full, sweeping) of the unity of all that is, and of the self as an intimate part of it.

One of the leading scientists of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, understood this way of apprehending the world. He said once that "the religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things as a meaningful unity."

This is the heart of mysticism: the experience of all things as a meaningful unity.

What is this unity, this something of which mystics become so intensely aware. Some mystics call it simply the One. Others say reality. Or ultimate reality. Or God. We must not let the names put us off, confuse us. What the words are pointing toward is the nature of things. What is, was, and will be. The widest context of our lives. That vast entity out of which we emerged, in which we live and move and have our being. Known to us in part; and in part unknown, mystery.

V. The Trance of Everyday Life

The conception almost all of us have of reality is the one we learned from our people as we grew up. This is how it is in every society: American, Russian, Chinese. As we grew up, we learned that reality was thus and so.

In our society, we learned that it was made up of atoms and sub-atomic particles, that women were inferior to men, that war (though regrettable) was essential to civilized life, that our major life goals should be success, security, status, and productivity. We learned to think, feel, and strive in the patterns we learned from our people. As they did in their time.

Almost all human beings live in a world created by words, ideas, values, rituals, myth, and the mass media. These elements together make up a framework of orientation, a world view which most people assume is the only proper way of looking at the world. All of our activities, our thoughts and feelings, the very shape, texture and quality of our lives are defined by this loose, messy collection of ideas and images. This framework of orientation is so close to us, so taken for granted, that it limits our freedom to see the world in any other way.

It is as though we were early in life hypnotized to see, feel, think, and behave in certain ways, and, like hypnotic subjects, we dutifully do as we have earlier been instructed to do. Mystics call this "the trance of everday life." It is a serious problem because, as it turns out, many of the instructions we have been given in this way are destructive and self-destructive.

Like the modern world view.

Mystical awareness can set us free from hypnotic captivity to the basic, largely unconscious, taken-for-granted assumptions of our society. This kind of awareness of the undivided whole may expand and complement our rational understanding, in order that we may rise above the insistent pressures of the modern world view that is now pressing us toward extinction.

It is a basic insight in mysticism that reality as we have been instructed to perceive it is seriously, destructively distorted, and that much human suffering is the result of people taking for granted that these distortions are a true image of the real world. As mystics see it, life as it is ordinarily lived is often out of touch, out of harmony with reality, and that this is why there is so much misery and destructiveness on earth. Mystics propose that we escape the hold of our social conditioning upon us, not let it totally determine any longer the way we understand the world and ourselves.

VI. Mysticism and UU Religion

It has gradually become clear to me that both the rational and the mystical world views are necessary for a full grasp of the nature of things. Either one pursued exclusively, limits, cripples, distorts our understanding of reality. Enthusiasts for each view tend to regard the other as benighted, hardly worth trifling with. In fact, both ways of viewing the world are important to us. It is not that we must blend them. They are disparate patterns of apprehension and do not mix. It is that we must include both rational and mystical awareness in our approach to understanding the world and ourselves.

I have been aware for some time now that our movement as a whole contains the elements of rational mysticism. However, in the 20th century, we have tended to equate mysticism with superstition and the supernatural, as do people generally. Only a few UUs have been willing to apply the dirty word "mystic" to themselves. This is highly regrettable because it fails to do justice to the essential nature of mysticism and the full identity of the Unitarian Universalist movement.

The movement as a whole is essentially a rational mysticism; and this is, in fact, its most valuable characteristic. We have managed to create a form of institutional religion which continually brushes aside all verbal formulations as the final statement of truth. Instead it remains deliberately, consciously, and reverently open, knowing that the truth that matters most is not that which can be stated on paper but that which lives in the self, the inner nature of each living human being.

The astounding achievements of science since the turn of the century have led UUs to be embarrassed by the mystical dimension of their religion. Now the time has come to celebrate it, to welcome the vastly expanded awareness and understanding it can bring us. It will enable us to contribute to the creation of the post-modern world view we now require in order that the human species may survive and flourish.

As a matter of fact, both the rational and mystical dimensions are evident in the most recent statement of principles and purposes of the denomination, developed in 1985. At one point the statement reads:

The living traditon we share draws from many sources:

• Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and openness to the forces which create and uphold life;...
• Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science...

Direct experience of transcending mystery, and also the guidance of reason and the results of science. Both the mystical and the rational are there in the most recent statement of our principles and purposes. In addition, the statement goes on to say that UU congregations affirm as two of the things that matter most: "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning," and, "respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part."

These are mystical characteristics. Mystics turn away from the teachings of established tradition, and set off on a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. They live with an intensely heightened awareness of the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

The identity of UU religion lies in its rational mysticism, which is a remarkable achievement for any form of institutional religion. It is, I have found, an exceedingly rich combination of perspectives. Let us cease to be embarrassed by the mystical dimension in our movement, and instead celebrate it, cultivate it consciously. Let us accept and affirm, as Einstein put it, "the experience of all things as a meaningful unity."

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com