If all mystical experiences come from the same divine source, then they should all say the same thing, right? Do they? Or are they a product of our own personal cultural and religious contexts? The answer is… kind of both.
On the one hand, mystical experiences are intensely personal. They use a symbolic language that is familiar to the person having the experience, which is why they’re so often filtered through the specific cultural and religious context that the person is already familiar with. Essentially, mystical experiences convey information that is… well, not beyond the capacity of humans to understand (or no one would have these experiences at all), but difficult for any human to understand directly. It has to be filtered and translated into a familiar “language” in order to be understood at all. This means that the experience will usually be put into the terms of the person’s existing religious beliefs.
The problem arises when the person receiving the message mistakes the language for the message, so that the experience ends up reinforcing the religious framework instead of pushing past it: “I saw a vision of Jesus, therefore he must be the One True God!” is not supposed to be the takeaway. Mystical experiences feel like some great and “objective” truth when you receive them, but they’re so heavily filtered through your personal framework that your bias is still present. No matter what framework you’re using, it can only approximate what the real truth is. If you want to see past your bais, one of the ways to do it is to compare your UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis) to everyone else’s. If you look past each person’s individual framework, you’ll start to see a pattern.
One of the first times I noticed this pattern is when I read Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love for one of my medieval classes in undergrad. Julian was an anchoress, and is notable for being the first (confirmed) woman with surviving works written in English. (Also, if anyone else here plays Fallen London, she’s the source of “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”) Revelations of Divine Love is an account of mystical experiences that she had while deathly ill. She witnessed Christ’s Passion, and received a message from God with an unusually positive character, especially for the Middle Ages:
And in this vision he [God] showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind’s eye it was round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, “What can this be?” And the answer came to me, “It is all that is made.” I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, “It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and in this same way everything exists through the love of God.” In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, the third is that god cares for it. —Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
This is just so beautiful!
It’s an important message that God is ultimately motivated by love, and that his aim is to help humanity transcend sin rather than to punish them for it. It you know anything about Catholicism, they place a pretty heavy emphasis on sin and guilt and punishing oneself for them. The message that Julian got directly from God contradicts this notion. It’s the polar opposite of the revolting fearmongering of something like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and a very different attitude towards the idea of sin in general. The context of “all shall be well” is that God does not hate us for our sin, and that God also does not blame us for our sin (in the exact same way that we shouldn’t blame Frodo Baggins for falling prey to the Ring at the Crack of Doom — literally anyone else wouldn’t even have made it that far.) That’s a big deal in the context of medieval Catholicism! So I thought to myself, if a nun living in seclusion in the fourteenth century managed to get the same basic message about the nature of the Divine that I did, filtered through her familiar context of Christ’s Passion and so forth, then there’s got to be something there.
Another surprising source of mystical resonance was H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft mostly wrote pulp horror based on his own paranoia and nightmares. His writing fluctuates between being beautifully descriptive and being dry, his big scares at the end aren’t always that affecting, and all his work is saturated with racism and xenophobia. But there’s a genuine mystical thread running through his work, especially his Dream Cycle stories, and every once in a while his work presents me with something that hits me like a truck. One such example was this section, plunked in the middle of an otherwise plodding story in which the protagonist expressed deep disdain for hillbillies:
The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand; while on my ravished sight burst the stupendous spectacle of ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves of living fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in air; extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable splendour. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather, supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes; covered with every lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eye could conceive of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal, plastic entity, which in consistency partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to me, was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar to me; just as it had been for uncounted aeons of eternity before, and would be for like eternities to come. Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated thus for a little time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects around us, as though some force were recalling me to earth—where I least wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel a change also, for it gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself prepared to quit the scene; fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of the other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous one and I were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it would be the last time. The sorry planet-shell being well-nigh spent, in less than an hour my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the hither stars to the very confines of infinity. […] At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly, and was rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English. “Joe Slater is dead,” came the soul-petrifying voice or agency from beyond the wall of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently animated. “He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much of an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has been my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years. I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the dark Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth-self know of life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquillity! […] —H.P. Lovecraft, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.”
Yes, we are meant to be shocked — shocked, I tell you! — that this mad, “degenerate” poor person had this effulgent higher-minded being living within him, because obviously his animalistic existence is unworthy of housing this being, yada yada… But, in and around Lovecraft’s bigotry is a real, profound insight: That we humans are actually subtle beings of light, that we come from “up there” somewhere and are only temporarily incarnated into these earthly bodies, and that our subtle bodies are not limited by space or time. That’s a very old mystical idea that shows up in many different contexts (though exactly what various groups of mystics decide to do with that information, varies). What really cinched it for me was the description of the spirit’s speech arriving fully-formed in the protagonist’s mind, and the protagonist understanding them immediately as if they were spoken in plain English, even though it’s just raw ideas that haven’t been put into words. That is exactly my experience whenever I talk to spirits! A description that is that specific suggests that Lovecraft must have experienced something similar, himself.
The ultimate example of mystical resonance that I’ve encountered is Carl Jung, who, like Julian, had a series of mystical visions that he recorded in a personal journal that became The Red Book. It’s written in the style of a medieval manuscript, and illuminated with fantastic illustrations. I’ve been reading through it, and have found that while Jung’s dreams aren’t that much like mine, he comes to many of the exact same conclusions that I’ve come to throughout my own mystical journey. That could partly be a result of his influence on me, but there’s a lot of stuff in there that I learned entirely on my own, and seeing it validated in his work is astounding. So far, I’ve read through Liber Primus and the first half of Liber Secundus, so go check those posts out if you want the whole story:
Since many different mystics from different walks of life end up having similar experiences and reaching similar conclusions, my belief is that there is something universal underneath it all. We may not be able to see it clearly, but it’s there, and we’re all interpreting it through our own unique set of internal lenses. If you find enough other people who have had the same mystical experiences as you have, your UPG becomes SPG, “Shared Personal Gnosis.” If you find ancient or historical accounts of such revelations that have been written down in primary sources, then it’s VPG, “Verified Personal Gnosis.” As a general rule, true divine revelations tend to impart the same messages. It’s always exciting and mind-blowing to find that you have the same revelations as someone else, even if they’re conveyed slightly differently.
Of course, it’s not always going to match up. A while back, I wrote this post to try to parse out different people’s UPG. It was my inclination at the time to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and to assume that everyone’s mystical experiences come from God. I quickly ran into problems there. Not only are there boatloads of crazy people on the internet who will claim to literally be the incarnation of this or that deity, but after a certain point, it actually becomes dangerous to take everyone’s UPG at face-value. The most cutting example is that of Sannion, who claimed that Dionysus himself gave him license to use a Nazi symbol. That put me in an awful place. Either I had to find a good reason that Sannion’s divine endorsement of facism was illegitimate, or I have to accept that my god told someone to use a Nazi symbol. (Or he could just be lying, but how should I know?) There’s also the fact that mystical experiences can be hard to process, for a number of reasons. Some people have mystical experiences and then never come back to earth again, believing themselves to be God, which isn’t exactly wrong, but still isn’t a productive way to live one’s life while one is still incarnated in a body. Some can’t separate the meaning of the words from the language it’s written in, and will use the mystical experience as justification for the entire filter, believing that their own filter has been proven right while everyone else’s is wrong. Some just go crazy.
What does one do, when confronted with UPG that’s just straight-up wrong? It’s tempting to use my own experience as a yardstick — the reason why Julian, Lovecraft, and Jung all had “real” mystical experiences is because, on some level, they match my own. That works to a point, because resonance really is a good sign that you’re on the same page, but you also have your own filter. My viewpoint isn’t any more “objective” than any of theirs, and my revelations aren’t any more true. If nothing else, they’re true for me. The important thing is to be aware of the filters, my own and everyone else’s. Some of those are cultural or religious, and many are psychological. Your own issues will get in the way if you don’t work through them!
So much of The Red Book consists of Jung disentangling himself from his filters, first from what he calls the Zeitgeist (i.e. “the spirit of the times,” the cultural background of twentieth-century Germany) and then from Christianity. He slowly peels back the layers of filtering until he can reach the revelations at their core, and even then, he usually has very strong emotional reactions to them that range from confusion and rejection to shame and disgust. And also, Jung is a psychiatrist. It’s literally his job to work on himself and to teach others how to do so. It’s possible that the only reason he was even able to address, dissect, and interpret all those symbols and complex emotions is because he had the necessary skills. Most people don’t work on themselves. Most people actively avoid working on themselves, and mystical experiences will usually force them to in one way or another. So, that’s another obstacle to interpreting mystical experiences.
With all that in mind, yes — there is something universal in mystical experiences, but they’re also deeply personal and rooted in the individual’s existing framework of religion, culture, associations, and symbols. In order to find the bits that are universal, one has to look past all the other stuff. But every attempt at making a “universal” religion has failed, becoming one interpretation out of many, because no interpretation is ever going to work for literally everyone. All the other stuff is also part of the condition of being human, and in many ways, it’s a feature and not a bug! One of the things I love the most about mysticism is that it personalizes religion. Mysticism allows God to approach you, directly, using your associations and your interpretation, translating itself into a symbolic language that is uniquely suited to you! The reason why someone else’s mystical experiences are different is because God has approached them in their way. We all see the same thing, because our different lenses allow us each to see it in the way that makes the most sense to us.
There are not many truths, there are only a few. Their meaning is too deep to grasp other than in symbols. —Carl Jung, The Red Book
The Opening of the Egg by Carl Jung
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