Episode 76 - Mysticism

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well there's good news the good news is tickets are still available for the austin liturgist gathering this may may 25th and 26th to be exact the bad news is they really are selling quickly so for those of you who are thinking about maybe joining us for the liturgist gathering in austin texas uh maybe head over to the littersgathering.com and look at the info and think about reserving your spot before you can't anymore see i thought the bad news was gonna be that you were not allowed to do the shave our heads and wear the white tuxedos because jenny was gonna kill you oh only the patrons know about that story that's right we talked about that in the last letters conversation which conveniently you could become a patron i didn't actually mean that to become a second ad but there you go it works together quite well and of course if you were a patron and you came to the liturgical gathering in austin then you could also go to our patrons only after party which is a party of the highest order i have uh removed my shirt at a litter's gathering after party at the screaming request of the crowd that might actually not be a selling point now that i think about it it's merely to illustrate the degree to which it really is a party yeah it's it's the it's the kind of order we're talking about yes there's a lot of dancing there's a lot of shots uh yeah good times when i was referring to the tuxedos we had had a plan but it was shut down uh for the sake of mike's survival but we're gonna try to show up and like the second on the morning saturday morning just kind of show up with all of our hair shaved off and wearing white tuxedos and just not say a word about it that was our plan but uh i still wish we could do it listen i was threatened with divorce papers i heard it i heard it first hand it wasn't gonna fly yeah jimmy's not having that i'll at least probably at least wear my kimono how about that i'm wearing it right now that's right i think about shaking it up maybe like a like a t-shirt and some jeans maybe a blazer maybe like a science t-shirt really really though instead of a plain t-shirt do a science t-shirt yeah yeah i can shake it up you can wear those black glasses i got new glasses oh they look the same these aren't the new glasses what i'm gonna bust those out for the first time in austin folks that's true that's literally true if you want to see my kimono and mike's new glasses what you need to take from this is the two of us get unreasonably excited about the liturgies gathering it is by far my favorite thing that we do because y'all are fun it's it's what i what i love is when we go to the liturgist gathering and we get in the room and you're all there you basically ignore us because all of you start forming friendships and hanging out and then continuing those relationships after you leave so it really is an amazing thing if you're a person who feels in some way you don't quite fit in with those around you in terms of how you have a spiritual belief system or practice or none at all and you really need a non-judgmental accepting space while you either process things or have processed things and have landed in a different place than those people around you all right well we'll see you there go to the liturgists.com gatherings or theliturgisgathering.com yeah go to that one the liturgists plural gathering the liturgists gathering or just google literature because it's hard to say when you say the website litter just sounds like you're just kind of stopping at the t especially me yeah but it has an s i'm told that when i say uh ask science mike it sounds like i'm saying ass science mike hmm ass science mike that's because you compress your own voice you take out those consonants i do oh man we are real effective advertisers folks okay so the episode today you're about to hear it's a good one um it's about one of our favorite topics in the world mysticism with hillary mcbride william matthews science mike i mean fish new doss aka michael gunger i like the aka like it's you your birth name is your aka i like that a lot all right enjoy the episode folks [Music] i was in the philippines and i traveled to an island just west of mainland philippines an island called palawan where people don't travel to very often it was really hard to find transportation and the transportation didn't come really frequently and this was on the back of my recovery from an eating disorder where i was trying to figure out what it meant to be in my body and experience the world around me i was staying in a little town called el nido up north in palawan and there was no one who spoke english around and i was able to catch a boat out into the ocean where there were these large rock structures jutting up from the water and the guide who was driving the boat told the other people on the boat to leave our things and to dive into the water and he pointed towards the wall and it was hard to see from where we were standing and if there was anything below us so we thought maybe there was fish or some sort of aquatic life that would be worth adventuring towards so together we left our clothes and our cameras and our wallets in this boat and together jumped into the water and swam down where we could see that there was this hole in the wall and so realizing this might be an interesting experience i swam through the hole in the wall to get to the other side where there was an incredibly pristine beach the most beautiful floor and fun i had ever seen and colorful fish that seemed to go on forever and i felt like i heard the voice of god but what's interesting when i felt like i heard the voice of god it felt like it connected me to everything around me i felt like i had this experience where i was both in my body and totally outside of my body at the exact same time i remember hearing specific words but also feeling like they weren't words that were limited to the inside of my head that they were all around me at the same time and as this was happening and i'm swimming in this totally undiscovered area of this tiny little island that felt almost impossible to get to there was a sense of wonder and awe that seemed to take over my entire body and in that moment i felt like god was in me and through me and i was in god and through god and that things were bigger than my understanding it's hard to come back from that experience and feel like things that are normal have as much meaning and value i remember one of the last things that i did in that little cove if you will was i grabbed a stone a stone that had a hole in it just like the hole that i'd swam through and i picked it off the floor of the ocean and swam all the way back to the boat with it in my hand and went through the town later and found a piece of string that i could wrap through that hole to wear on my neck and for almost three years i wore that string with that rock around my neck to remind myself the sense of the bigness and the tangibleness of the god that i'd experienced in that moment welcome to the liturgist podcast [Music] so what is mysticism and what are mystical experiences i read a paper once as i was trying to figure out hey the first time i had a mystical experience i'd never heard the term so i was left trying to figure out what happened and it's only through uh reading another book i ran into a reference to this paper um that's pretty old it's a stace uh schrader okay good we have different info who identifies the seven characteristics common to missile experiences which uh he analyzed simply by interviewing a lot of people who had mystical experiences and he said they were one ineffability which is the inability to capture the experience in ordinary language to noetic quality or the notion that it contained otherwise hidden or inaccessible knowledge three transiency meaning that they happen in a short period of time they're not perpetual or ongoing four is passivity which is the sense that the mystical experience is happening to you it's not something that you inve invoked or control five is the unity of opposites meaning this creates a sense of oneness wholeness or completeness six is timelessness meaning there's a sense that the experience transcends time it's seven it's excuse me transcends time itself and then seven a feeling that one has somehow encountered the true self um and i remember the first time i read that just pin pricks all over my body because it's so well articulated what it was like for me in that moment where i felt like i was i was in the presence of god and in some ways um discovering myself for the first time but it's it's we also want to you know make the distinction that mystical experiences and mysticism are distinct from one another you can have no mystical spiritual practice whatsoever and suddenly have a mystical experience or you can be a person who practices mystic spirituality even in the context of a specific religious tradition but never have a specific mystical experience mysticism is um i think most simply stated um a spirituality which is not tied to specific language or imagery whereas a mystical experience is a short-term or temporary experience that has such a radical impact on the person who's had it that they aren't able to articulate it with language so even if someone is you know uh a conservative american protestant if they have a mystical experience they won't be able to summarize it in passages of scripture or specific imagery other than to say perhaps that they were in the presence of god [Music] i find it also helpful to think about stacey's definition of mystical experience which looks at how there is a constellation of experiences that regardless of religion tends to show up and these are really interesting to compare with what you just said a few are similar and some are different a sense of unity with the world which you'd also said transcending space and time feeling that something is ineffable but stace also qualifies that there is a sense of sacred a deeply felt positive mood in that moment and that the experience feels real so it doesn't it's not felt or sensed as being a dissociative episode and leaves a positive change in the self that it has an impact that lasts beyond the finite nature of the experience itself and apparently according to these criteria we can say that in north america about 30 to 40 percent of the population have had a mystical experience wow schrader estimates it is much lower but how much lower i don't remember a specific number yeah and i think it's helpful to also look at some of the same the things that overlap the belief systems which might promote mystical experiences um like having a belief and a sense of unity with all other people might promote a mystical experience same with people who've had other kinds of out-of-body experiences but this research also shows that there is common religious imagery when having mystical experiences associated with drug use uh in 96 of people in this one study who took um a psychedelic drug there was some type of religious imagery 91 saw a church or temple 58 saw a sacred person 49 saw a devil or a demon and 34 saw a religious symbol so it seems that in the majority well obviously almost all people who've had some sort of mystical experiences that are drug induced that there's an overwhelming number of people who have a religious component to it it's a funny thing to talk talk about this topic to me because it's sort of the like you use that that uh analogy a couple weeks ago of the the fish in the water how can you even see it uh this is mysticism is sort of the water for the liturgist podcast uh and like talking about it directly like is a is a funny feeling to me because it's there's no to me there's not an it to talk about yeah same here uh even as you you're talking even as you're sharing your story it just brings so many feelings up for me feelings of uh unsure how to communicate uh like i don't know how to say that experience in a way that is meaningful or matters um outside of what was felt and seen or you know in that moment also i think of that scripture where it says you know when mary met the angel she pondered these things you know quietly in her heart and i think mysticism generally tends to be those types of experiences where they are hard to put into words and you don't know um how to qualify them but i feel the same way that when something really sacred has happened like the story that i just told i feel really reluctant to share the story because it feels so intimate for me and so transformative and foundational and it feels like it gets cheapened the more that i talk about it and so i've actually only shared that story once or twice before oh wow thank you for sharing that thing with us it's hard because it's it's the it's the same conversation about mysticism to me is the same conversation about god the moment we start putting too many words on it and too many definitions and too many it begins to lose its magic or it's the wideness of the experience to the narrowness of the language uh around it i don't talk a lot about uh mystical experiences i've had after my first book yeah not and there is the one thing like it's very intimate but when i say i don't talk about i mean literally to anyone ever because it has created such a distance like the most profound moment of my life my primary recollection at this point is myself telling people about the most profound moment of my life and when the reason mystics are mystics is to be able to sit with those experiences that's the basis of their spirituality and so i am a mystic whose most profound experience in mysticism has become distant specifically through the use of language you know when i first started telling people out of excitement about like my beach story i would have to go back and listen to recordings of myself telling it in earlier earlier versions to help remember the actual sensory experience that happened at the time because when you recall an experience and you're processing through your language centers you're changing it every time and so if i have something that happens to me now through meditation or contemplation that has those seven characteristics now i just kind of sit with it and [Music] but i don't turn it into a narrative and i simply wait to encounter it again in contemplation and that's like a strange thing because growing up evangelical like one of the primary onuses of spirituality was replicating the spiritual experience to other people and mysticism does not create that kind of a drive mysticism it may change your behavior and temperament towards others it may make you more charitable or more kind but it doesn't at least in my experience with any mystics i've met from multiple faith traditions turn you into someone who has a zeal to convert others to mysticism to your perspective yeah yeah they don't say oh i'll be like you know what you really need to do yeah transcend all language brother would you like to transcend all languages like it's just not a it's not a thing the doubt that can be spoken is not the true dao i think that when we feel something and we're excited about it because we're such relational beings it often feels really good to share that experience with someone and i think that sometimes we do that maybe even to reify it yeah for it to feel real exactly yeah for it to be to feel real and become a connective point and yet i've had experiences where i've shared it with people and it actually felt like it reduced it down both in trying to put it into words but in their reaction going wait what happened or no or to what then what happened i thought no no you're pulling me out yeah of the felt experience and rick hansen the neuroscientist has done really interesting work on changing our brain through savoring positive experiences and how that actually actually can help us buffer against things that would you know lead us probably more into a depressive mindset or having symptoms of depression and so when we have positive experiences like a felt sense of joy or love to stay with it and to let it deepen and to keep it within yourself almost as if you're tasting a really incredible dessert or something you just want to sit with it and let it let all of your senses become alive and awake and how you can draw those experiences out as a way of making them real for you neurologically and then giving your brain the opportunity to go back there more frequently because you've actually built a neural network that supports the revisiting of that kind of experience [Laughter] in an interesting way mystical experiences can become uh stumbling blocks for a mystical spiritual path because it is so easy to get attached to them they're so beautiful and life-altering and when you have them you can you feel like you've seen how it is how could you ever go back to seeing things any other way and you want you want to do something you want to build an altar you know i've got a rock upstairs in my dresser that from a mystical experience that i had that it has the word flow on it i just remember that was part of the experience i was like oh and yeah like i've literally built altars before like out in the out in the woods or something like plowed rocks on each other or or yeah kept mementos kept necklaces from a pilgrimage i went on one time and i found in my spiritual practice through the years that when i try to keep going back to it i don't think there's anything wrong with like appreciating it and savoring it as much as possible but it's easy to keep looking back and the mystical experience always happens right now it's it's a full experience of the now it's it's eyes fully open mind unclenched heart open to now into the fullness of that mystery and experiencing it in a fuller way than one might normally and there typically ego constricted zone [Music] and so trying to become or become that person that can see like that be to try to become a mystic to try to become a spiritually enlightened person um has in that very seeking the very problem like it's the trying to be somewhere else trying to have something else other than what is right here and right now um and so those experiences it's a weird it's weird how we can talk about them and it minimizes the experience for us but it also takes us away from right now and also like because it can become an idol it can become something that you're seeking like a a high to get back to and so i think that's part of the reason maybe that mystics are often wary of keeping to just revisit and talk about those things those experiences because it's then you're talking about an experience a memory an abstraction of a now rather than just encountering the now that is always eternally present [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists so i i would just say that i i feel like i'm a spiritual person i feel like i've always been on a spiritual path since i was a young kid i've always felt like i've walked a mystical journey and i've had mystical experiences along the way and um but there was a season in a phase where i knowing that the older i got wanted to press into that wanted more of that wanted like sought after mystical experiences um did you feel like is it is what you just said like kind of the fruit of what you learned going through that that type of phase of like seeking the mystical experience is it wrong to seek mystical experiences no is it is that a necessary stepping stone into that whole the holy and the sacred in that i mean i think even when you when you read those descriptions of people that have have reported musical experiences they report it's not something that they feel like they did it's not something that you feel like you and when you have it it's not like something you feel like oh i finally accomplished the mystical experience it was it was gifted to you or that's not even a great way of saying it yeah well uh gift it's not wrong why is god well it's it implies a duality but as you as you come back to duality it feels like a gift or maybe just given give but still a given has a giver and a receiver um just both are you or the or just the flow of the universe being that of givenness that everything is given to another and forms something you know yeah um there are practices you can undertake that increase your probability yeah to have a mystical experience but none of the members none of them take you to 100 percent or even close to it and that makes it really hard for us to research what a mystical experience is because we can't create them even in people who are more prone to them so it's really hard for us to know what they're actually like we can't put someone in an fmri scanner during a mystical experience well they do have a close cousin available pharmaceutically through psychedelics and we have studied the brains of people on psychedelic substances um and i'm actually i mean the problem is again that reproducibility but i'd be really curious to know mystical experiences cause the same sort of state of you know highly interconnectedness in the brain or if they create the same kind of we know psilocybin for example you know actually causes your brain to actually generate and grow a lot of dendrites at once which then changes the way the next time you sleep that your neural circuits are groomed um and there's you know long-term impacts on mood and optimism and even color perception in the case of psilocybin which by the way in this program and on at science mike we get a ton of questions from people about mysticism psychedelics and spirituality the thread running through all those things yeah and we've got pretty good evidence that mysticism is a health intervention for people that it's good for you to experience a mystical experience and so wouldn't it be nice if we could make them happen but then of course it becomes an object and it loses its sacredness i found a study from decker in 2007 that showed that mystical experiences were transformative and healing for combat veterans and it actually was much more effective for them than several other kinds of intervention so it gave a sense of meaning and purpose but again you can't prescribe a mystical experience but you can set one on the path ish but the problem is if you set them on the path by saying try these practices and their goal is specifically a mystical experience and not mystic spirituality you could just be setting them up for perpetual frustration in fact it's statistically likely you're setting them up for perpetual frustration so set them up for spirituality right and that was actually one of the main takeaways from this paper was we need to support people to understand that spirituality is a mental health intervention and that it helps us be well as humans if not just for providing community than providing a sense of meaning and giving you a way to make sense of painful experiences so that you're not stuck in them so what do you what do you see is the differences between mental health and spirituality do you see any differences that's a pretty m what between mental illness or mental health or between between your like your field yeah clinical counseling and um psychology or brain al all the whatever i do whatever you do and spirituality is are they the exact same thing or is there any delineation in your mind no i think that i think that they're not the same thing and i actually think of of spirituality as being an essential component of human experience and thriving and i think psychology helps us measure and come up with tools to understand what that looks like in people's lives when they're thriving but i don't think psychology is an answer or makes you feel one with the world so i think of spirituality probably being a a solution for a psychological problem psychology really is the study of human thought and behavior and counseling psychology takes us into the domain of what does it mean to be well as a human being and what are the social justice components of mental health and how do we thrive as people both individually and collectively and i think it's pretty hard to have that conversation without also dipping into spirituality is a thing that helps us see that all people are valuable and that everyone has worth and that we're actually not different from each other and we're actually ultimately all connected so in in the future of religion ken wilber book um gotta be the most referenced figure in season four so far so far you gotta read that then um don't don't pollute your mind whoa whoa but he makes a delineation makes the delineation between waking up growing up and cleaning up and so growing up would be more like spiral dynamic stuff that we've talked about as far as moving from survival baseline instincts just more of a a wee tribal mythic mindset or magic might set to a mythic sort of one story we do a rational to a postmodern pluralistic so that's sort of like growing up in societies moving like oh there's more complexity than just i got to get my stuff yeah and growing up that way and oh what about this group of people that is under the the boot of oppression that's a that's a more complicated like you don't think of that crap when you're getting chased by a lion well yeah that's maslow's hierarchy of needs as well exactly so that kind of that's growing up he says that waking up is more of this spiritual path of becoming aware of ultimate reality of the underlying unity of all of that um whereas growing up would be more of like a relative truth sort of situation waking up would be ultimate reality and then cleaning up would be a lot some more of like shadow work and some psychological work and he's saying he makes the case that in the west we've we've done a great job compared to most of the world at growing up we have you know obviously have a long way to go but we have things like the civil rights movement and feminism and there's there's like movement towards growing up in the west where a lot of places in the east and other places in the world that it's it's still very there's caste systems and patriarchy is not being it's institutionalized as law but the west has largely remained completely unaware of any conversation about waking up it's just we're totally asleep to that conversation and all of our in academia and our institutions and every like it's just not even it's not even part of our vernacular the only thing we even use close to awake in the terms that have been used for millennia is woke and that's about growing up that's not about we just totally out of our consciousness but conversely in the east they've done a lot of more work and progress with waking up and they've got great practices and traditions and philosophies with helping people wake up but stuck in some very primitive ways growing up so you you have you can have these mystical experiences this is what i love about what he's saying is because i've been confused about hearing people you hear sometimes you hear spiritual teachers or people that have had mystical experiences and they're teaching things that you can tell like you've seen like you've seen how it is like you have felt the underlying reality how are you so messed up like why is there still so much you're a chauvinist still like why are you still you're a racist system yeah caste system yeah how is that possible and seeing the differences so when you have these you can have a mystical not only experience but awareness and groundedness of the underlying unity of all things and still be interpreting those experiences through the viewpoints of growing up so you can you might see a great light on a beach and depending where you are in the growing up ladder of spiral dynamics sort of or maslow or any other that kind of those models um you're going to interpret it differently somebody might interpret it as god somebody might interpret it as their brain firing neurons somebody might interpret it as a bodhisattva visited them you know it's an angel whatever the goddess gaia depending on what your your growing up views and structures and interpretation lenses are so it all comes together in experience and then the shadow work the way the cleaning up can affect all that as well so you can have you can have a very high uh nuanced growing up and and have a pretty high up waking up but have these shadows from earlier stages in your life that keep you that can actually cause some of the like you can actually use some of the power that you gain from uh seeing the underlying nature of systems you can see like wow i can manipulate this system i can see how this is tied to this and this is tied to this and use that for bad things you can use that to destroy in the world based on shadows that may have been arrested and undealt with from earlier stages of development anyway mark zuckerberg oh i'm sorry i didn't hear the cough thanks for the the communication because that that was beautifully savage beautifully i don't know what you're talking about anyway how that all goes together i think is fascinating and and clarifies how it's all needed all the the psychological approaches to see what's actually going on what are the traumas that are happening what are some of the shadows that we're carrying around shadow boxing shadow avoiding um how are we interpreting these experiences are they coming into containers that are inherently violent that are inherently racist and sexist and oppressive and we're using these mystical experiences to sort of um operate more powerfully in destructive systems um i think the church does that too yeah uh you know using the spirodynamics language right you know you can have a second tier experience but be very you know still you know in a a blue v meme right or uh i think a lot of people and will use those experiences as a way to justify like their theology to justify their um bigotry hatred um because they haven't like you said they might be enlightened in this area but they haven't grown all the way up the things that you were saying reminded me of some of the work that i'm reading in that's emerging in the field of neuroscience and affective neuroscience and how everything that we're learning right now is pushing us towards integration and integration in every sense of the word that we want all the parts of the brain to be working together we want the mind and the body to be working together we want us and them to not be us and them but all of us and how we see our brains and our identities and the world and an integration sounds like a great place to move to promote more mystical experiences that we want more we want more of a sense of things being together and things being better because they're together [Music] when we do brain imaging studies on people who have had mystical experiences and we ask them to recall that experience we find a activation pattern in the brain that is in many ways similar to the networks we associated when we ask people who believe deeply in god to think of god and what's interesting about that recollection is if immediately after asking someone to recall a mystical experience you ask them to describe it you watch the energy patterns of the brain shift towards the temporal lobes towards the memory center of the brain towards the prefrontal cortex and then as they begin to describe the experience the network of activation in the brain changes from the prior state and then if later in that session or indeed in a completely separate session you ask someone to recall that mr experience again that original pattern isn't seen again now if you ask someone in a brain imaging study to recall a mystical experience and then you don't ask them to articulate it in language in further imaging studies the integrity of the original pattern in the networks of the brain remains and this led neuroscientist andrew newberg to state that he believes therefore the most genuine form of spirituality is mystical spirituality because it allows the integrity of the experience to persist and therefore also to continue to transform the individual okay the word of andrew newberg thanks be to andrew with an s as referenced earlier in the program it's a very efficient way i'm sorry but i'm not sorry every day begins with the same realization i am i exist as i rouse slowly from a state of unknowing and unawareness my senses continue to play a symphony that was already in progress for an audience that just walked in my awareness my consciousness me we humans experience this miracle every day and we often approach it with dread or a sense of loss there is something lovely about being warm and without any awareness of the self and the problems that awareness come with we need things food water shelter safety sex friendships likes comments shares to make a mark in life to be remembered to be and most importantly not to not be it is frankly quite stressful and worrisome like everyone else i've spent my life trying to find safety by building a view of the world that makes sense i feel best when these views help me find a secure place in a community of other people and when i find a way of seeing things that makes me feel safe i can become obsessed with defending it this may be views about god or views about which political party is best to vote for or maybe even what musical group is the greatest of all time whatever it is i want to feel certain that i am right because that certainty means i am safe and that the rug under me will under no circumstances be pulled out [Music] but life is tricky and a masterful puller of rugs too many times in life i have found myself on the floor with a sore backside watching with astonishment as life walks away with yet another treasured rug i am a christian then an atheist then unmoored confused and rugless it is here at the end of all my ideas i get a glance of freedom back to that first moment of each day as the symphony of senses plays on regardless of how i tried to categorize and therefore control the experience mysticism has taught me that the first moments after waking are very important because your response to awareness can reshape each day and therefore your entire life experience [Music] on a mystical morning it begins with i am i am awake i am aware i am temporary i am a brain telling itself a story i am as julian of norwich so beautifully stated made of god i am not in control of this moment or any moment at all i am free to experience this moment without trying to control or understand it i am able to understand some things sometimes but getting too invested in this understanding often leads to loss and heartache i am choosing to be grateful and to be aware of this moment and to be at all i am choosing to hold loosely to my understanding i am choosing to release my need for certainty in every moment i am alive for another day and determined to savor its joys and sorrows i am mysticism is about what happens at the end of the road of knowing it is not some gleeful rejection of knowledge or wisdom some kind of willful spiritual ignorance instead it is about an understanding that our knowledge has limits and when we consider the greatest of all things language knowledge and human constructs can't bottle the unspeakable through years of mystical practice and quite a lot of therapy i have learned to hold my ideas about god loosely and that's led me to hold all my ideas loosely and that has led to a beautiful journey of losing my intellectual ego though this loss caused grief it's led to a profound fascination in hearing the stories and experiences that other people have in life especially those people who understand god differently than i do which is of course everyone it has led to a lot less stress as i recognize the folly of trying to control my life or the lives of other people but most of all steering my awareness toward a mystical view of reality has shown me that beauty is all around me all the time in very unexpected places those parts of the universe that i once saw as unclean because they are made of god too whatever that means in trying to explain what mysticism is like for me it may be more helpful to explain what it's not like it's not like an inflation of the ego it's not a feeling that i am important or even that i am unimportant loved or unloved it's not a feeling that i am close to god it's not even really a feeling it simply is the experience of what is directly when i used to think about god i thought of him as an other someone else out there then i thought of her as close as close as my own breath then they became my breath then there was no breath it just was this the non-dual interconnected all as it is and what is this is it atoms and molecules and quarks is it spirit is it math is it story is it god the ego spins stories and crafts words about all of this giving it names the mystic simply experiences it all the doctrines and belief systems and names and the like are all fine and good and have their place but in the face of true reality all of this is shadow it's phantoms little idols for our amusement mysticism for me is about neti neti not this not that as i can speak of it or think about it it's simply this in its infinite and present glory to experience this directly there's nothing to do there's nothing to accomplish or strive for nothing to receive nothing to give it just is he just is a just is you can't escape it and when you stop trying there it is all in all god isness brahman christ the universe form and void call it whatever you want but don't take the name too seriously if you don't want your egos illusions to be your final end game [Music] the sun in drag a poem by hafez is translated by daniel ladinski in the book the gift [Music] you are the son in drag you are god hiding from yourself remove all the mind that is the veil why ever worry about anything listen to what your friend hafez knows for certain the appearance of this world is a magi's brilliant trick though its affairs are nothing into nothing you are a divine elephant with amnesia trying to live in an ant hole sweetheart oh sweetheart you are god in drag [Music] stay close to those sounds the sun turns a key in a lock each day as soon as it crawls out of bed light swings open a door and the many kinds of love rush out onto the infinite green field your soul sometimes plays a note against the sky's ear that excites the birds and planets stay close to any sounds that make you glad you are alive everything in this world is helplessly reeling an invisible wake was created when god said to his beautiful dead lover be hafez who will understand you if you do not explain that last line well then i will sing it this way when god said to illusion be again those were poems from the gift poems by hefez the great sufi master from compass thanks to daniel widdinski for allowing us to read those on the podcast did you hear jesus's words any differently after your first musical experience did you ever i don't like i don't want to talk about it i'm not saying talk about the first possibilities no no i don't want to talk i don't want to i don't want to talk about it interesting yeah um i respect that anybody else let's get four mystics to do a show on mysticism and no one wants to share that like i'm not going to tell you [Laughter] when you see you will know [Laughter] yeah i mean that's another thing the doubt like who who he who doesn't know speaks and he who knows does not speak but it's not like that's not to say i have a i have a bit of a beef when mysticism is is is um communicated as this exclusive domain yeah right this exclusionary practice no that's not just you just can't explain it that doesn't mean it's uh closed off to anybody right it doesn't mean that you know you have to pay a guru 5 000 after a pilgrimage so they can show you the light i often think and and i could be wrong in this but i often think that just when you're doing it all wrong and going about it wrong that there can be this moment where it just turns and there's an opening and there's there's a crack where the light gets to come in and so you could be pursuing these experiences in all the wrong ways and going about it and and and you know all of that and yet somehow i i have to think or and it has been my experience so not just have to think that even when going about it wrong that an opportunity presents itself like a a new way of seeing unfolds um just when you are probably at your shittiest or just that you're veinous in this whole like endeavor of spirituality um i've found in my own personal life sometimes the the moment i least expected the mystical experience to happen is when it actually happens like when i'm not looking for it and you know but i'm looking for it but then i finally kind of just stopped looking for it and then it's like right there kind of as if it's been waiting there the whole time looking to break in [Music] back to your read the bible differently what's the greatest commandment in scripture do you remember love the lord your god your neighbor as yourself yeah greatest love lord your god right that comes from luke 10 where which immediately goes into the good samaritan story well after my first missile experience i started getting back into the bible again eventually then i had another mystical experience and i got really into the bible after that one because my first most experienced i felt like i was in the presence of god for a few moments and my second mystical experience i felt like i was in god's lap for like a year like it was so intense so i got really into the bible again because the the my concerns about historicity and all these things kind of faded and the bible as um an accounting of experiences like mine but ancient and transcendent became very important so you know i've really since since my spiritual re-awakening through mysticism the good samaritan has been my favorite thing in the whole bible but instead of reading luke 10 i was reading mark and mark 12 goes through uh the same story but from a different perspective and what's fascinating to me is in mark 12 verse 29 and this is for all of you who say we never cite specific scripture references on the literature's podcast excuse me i'll start in 28. what does that thank people people say that yes yeah especially our itunes radios whenever we get a non when we get a non five or four star reference it's either like they're false teachers or they never cite specific scripture references i'm not pushing back on either of those so 28 verse 28 this is mark 12 verse 28. one of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating noticing that jesus had given them a good answer he asked them of all the commandments which is the most important the most important one answered jesus is this hear o israel the lord is our god the lord is one love the lord your god with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength so now then this this telling of that event doesn't go into the parable of the good samaritan it actually goes in and deconstructs the idea of the messiah in terms of political lineage now what's fascinating to me is deuteronomy 6 4 uh was my favorite old testament verse post mystical experience yes that's that's like the um because it speaks to this this mysterious unity of of the divine and so here and my favorite account of the teachings of christ is my most profound and favorite teaching from the old testament about the oneness of god and so this commandment to love god with everything you have begins with the explanation of the oneness of the divine which to me puts like kind of a different spin on the whole concept it takes away from this like narcissistic god needing worship to opening yourself up completely to the connection with one um and then and then it pulls it back incarnationally so now you've done this love one with all of yourself and now love your neighbor as yourself um and i thought it was interesting that when you the gospel takes it through that perspective we don't go straight into who is my neighbor but who is messiah and basically answered us well it's not the son of david it's not just another king [Music] and so what i found is post mystical experience and post mystical spirituality is i approach the scripture not through a term of legalism anymore and not through a term of finding like concrete answers to moral questions or you know specific doctrines that become boundary markers around who is in and who is out and who is right who is wrong and instead find reflected in the pages of the bible the same light that animated that moment on the beach and has animated other moments of incredible beauty since then and that's why i can identify as a christian comfortably because i find that oneness in the pages of the bible and that's what allows me to feel like i can comfortably identify myself as a christian but it's also what lets me count like any mystic from any spiritual tradition as my brother my sister as my co-journeyer and honestly any person who pursues the divine from any tradition be it spiritual an ancient wisdom tradition or even a sense of transcendence or imminence in a secular context because that that beautiful oneness is animating all of those things and present within it [Music] i thought about this on the names episode a little bit but um the esoteric versus the exoteric nature of all religions and at the center of all the big ones there's mysticism like you can find them in any of the major religions you can find mystics at the center of it and arguably the founders of those religions uh or the right once i had mystical experience and i saw the words of jesus it was like oh my god like how how have we so misread this it's crazy you can hear like oh he see okay he sees how it is and he's telling us how it is and we are the people that he's telling us they can't hear what he's saying i mean he just spells it out he's like i'm telling you these things and some of these seeds fall on soil and there's thorns and some of them fall in the rocks you don't know what i'm saying they're just telling you that the religion that founds itself on his name has so ironically and unfortunately been exactly opposite of everything jesus was about time and time again from the crusades to current day politics this is the reason that i don't currently call myself a christian even though i love christ and i love christians and for a lot of the same reasons that mike still calls himself a christian i still hold to a lot of that and love a lot of that as well as far as a label right now i just don't know it's like like if there was like a albert einstein religion that was about how time is objective space of time there is no relativity it's like precisely jesus you've made this thing about jesus this exclusive weird exclusionary three-tiered universe what what what are you talking about hero with you the lord our god is one i'm the vine and you're the branches and it's all you see me you've seen the father there's just this constant oneness through his teachings that he's inviting not only identifying with the father himself identify inviting us into that identification but then it gets it gets translated and translated out and out and out and out and abstracted into religion and where i land with all the externals and names and labels in the future i have no idea but i am far more interested in the mystical centers of all the religions at the core of the religions when you talk about like whether you're saying father spirit son or brahman vishnu shiva there's the jews there's the stuff at the center of it the truth that is directly experienced and then you like try to turn it into words and you try to turn it into doctrine and you try to turn into metaphor and imagery and that's the exoteric part of the religions but the esoteric that center that gooey center in the middle of all of it is the same i think about me five years ago or 10 years ago hearing that i would have wrote you off as a heritage uh but i know what helped me and i just want to give two recommendations uh same author actually uh things hidden by richard rohr scripture spirituality that's a great reference to a lot of stuff michael's talking about as well as uh his other book divine dance i think they take the synthesis um of what the mystics are talking about and and show you how he's christian yeah and he's christian he's a franciscan monk he he breaks those things down for for for all you christian uh fundamentalists out there who are like i don't get it the christian fundamentalists uh they will not delight in the writings of richard rohr i say that i say that to the ones on the brink because there's the ones that listen to this podcast started a journey okay because if you're like full on funding yeah yeah yeah yeah not for long if you ever brought richard rohr to me in my sbc days i would have politely smiled and then prayed for your soul every night but then there came a point where it was yeah yeah tipping point so for those of you who don't identify as being christian or even spiritual we might propose that phenomenology is an interesting avenue towards mysticism phenomenology the science of phenomena is distinct from that of the nature of being an approach that concentrates on this study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience one of the things that i'm learning in my reading about phenomenology particularly the dutch school of phenomenology and max van manen's work is to do phenomenology you can't think about things you have to live it you have to live in a space of wonder so even doing hermeneutic phenomenology as a research methodology you can't actually do it correctly unless you're curious and from a place of authenticity and you have a sense of appreciation and gratitude for the mystery and the wonder of existence as as it's experienced through consciousness so phenomenology really is our study of human experience as we consciously experience it and what it means to notice the things that are given to see what exists the phenomena and i think that we can practice being in a state of wonder about the things around us the feel of a petal on our finger the sensation of food that we delight in in our mouth and having a sense of expansive wonder and awe about just the experience of being alive i wonder if practicing wonder through phenomenology could be a way to strengthen the neural networks that allow us to access a mystical experience because we're already living with one foot out the door we're already living with a sense of ah and majesty and since i've started doing phenomenology as in research methodology believe it or not this is through my research work i feel like i'm having these micro mystical experiences so perhaps not meeting all of the criteria that we listed before but moving into a state of wonder and awe and transcendence and oneness and gratitude and a sense of losing understanding of time and space and just being in something whether it's appreciating the way a bird is flying in the sky or smelling a beautiful smell it feels like the practice of wonder is slowly taking over my life in a way that's enriching even the most subtle or even mundane moments that's me doing the the podcast thing don't quit your day job that is the podcast thing though boom boom boom [Music] don't quit your day job [Music] pump oh it's not pitchy enough to match my voice this is our outro oh i thought we were just listening to music i was like well this is nice well we hope you've enjoyed this episode on mysticism i guess kind of our opus in terms of spirituality for those of you who say that we don't go into enough spiritual things on literature's podcast that's two in a row although sorry to all of our secularist and atheist listeners who have been complaining that we've been getting too spiritual lately have people been saying that yes we can please exactly one third of the audience at any one time that's what happens when you make science faith in art so if you'd like to tell us why this episode was not spiritual enough or too spiritual you can do so by going to the liturgist.com podcast and finding the episode on mysticism where you can leave a comment you can also do the same on facebook.com the liturgists or at the liturgist on twitter or instagram or the best place to have a conversation about the episode is of course on the patreon forum because that's where all the the real insiders talk about stuff it's my favorite place for these conversations yeah they're like paragraphs and paragraphs stories they're amazing yeah um if you want access to that you can just become a patron even if it's a buck a month you can get access to that see these episodes and um also get access to all the meditations and everything else on the patreon as well oh i would like to thank tom crouch she gave me a few uh tracks that we were able to use on this episode some of his instrumental stuff that was nice your hosts have been hilary mcbride william matthews michael gunger and me science mike thanks for listening everybody you