How can mysticism be seen as resonance with reality?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw mysticism as a building of the bridge to the future while we are walking on it.

This week we will take a look at yet another aspect of mysticism, that of ‘resonance”.

Resonance and Mysticism

Another approach to recognizing the play of mysticism in life is to recognize that mysticism is a natural manifestation of it.  Richard Rohr looks to the ancient mystics for clues of how they understood the experience of mysticism.  In the cases of Theresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen, he saw them as recognizing that

“The human person is a microcosm with a natural affinity for or resonance with its macrocosm, which many call God. Our little world reflects the big world. The key word here is resonance.”

   Rohr sees such resonance as that state of consciousness which

 “…allows your mind to resonate with what is visible and right in front of you. … it erases the separateness between the seer and the seen.”

   As with most of the facets of human consciousness that we have addressed, while Hildegard and Theresa’s mystical experiences were highly formed by their religious beliefs, the underlying experience itself is here seen as a mode of basic human consciousness.  As we have explored it, it is simply a skill which is, as Audre Lorde put it in her poem “The Unsayable’

“…the way we give names to the nameless so it can be thought.”

   From her insight, it is the transferal from the ‘felt’ to the ‘thought of’, or from our subjective intuition to our objective articulation.

Seen thusly, it can be seen as the insight which underlays every religious attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’ (as Teilhard puts it).  And as we have addressed it here, it is the peering into the ‘not-yet-understood’ facet of reality with which we must deal while we attempt to understand it.

However, just because we cannot nail it down, Teilhard and all the mystics treat the ‘unarticulated’ as worthy of being ‘trusted’.  In Teilhard’s rendition of his own ‘descent into himself’, his search for the source of his life that we saw in our look at Teilhard’s seven steps of meditation, he ends with the insight that at the bottom of everything lies a principle that can be ‘trusted’.

   “Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us.  But it reels still more when we try to number the favorable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and succeed in its enterprises.

   After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself- a second thing made me dizzy: Namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikely-hood of finding myself existing in the heart of a world that has survived and succeeded in being a world.

At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars.  And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

It is I, be not afraid.”

Teilhard addresses this idea of the human facility of resonance with reality when he sees the reasoning process as consisting of both intuition and empiricism

“Intuition bursting upon a pile of facts”

   He goes a little further when he suggests that there is something in human consciousness that provides a subjective reaction as we approach a more complete understanding of the real.  The ‘aha’ moment is always accompanied by an ‘aha’ feeling.  Such a nonconscious physiological reaction to reality is experienced by all of us every day.  We say that we are ‘moved’ by a melody or a work of art, but exactly what happens among the neurotransmitters that connect our sensory organs, brain and body when this happens?  Such terms as ‘heartfelt’ are commonly used to address them, suggesting to some that the heart is, like the eyes and ears, a sensory organ itself. Do not we feel such physiological effects in our chest area?  Such physiological responses can be felt throughout our whole body as our hairs can ‘stand on end’, our ‘skin can crawl’, we can become lightheaded, we ‘tingle all over’.

Science can and does study such reactions, but a complete understanding of how such nonconscious physiological reactions result from a ‘mere’ conscious perception continues to elude us.

Such reactions are common, and they all suggest our capability to resonate with our macrocosm.

Thus, in its most basic form, mysticism is simply a name for this fundamental human capability.  How we make sense of these basic human reactions to external stimuli, however, is highly informed by what we believe about the stimuli itself.  Religious mystics will interpret these reactions in terms of what they believe to be true about reality, to the point where extreme physical reactions can occur, such as in the case of those with stigmata.

But, as Teilhard, Merton, Bourgeault and Rohr demonstrate, the thrill of the ‘aha’ sensation can also appear as a light for our exploration of reality in a way that clarifies our part in it.

Next Week

This week we addressed mysticism from the vantage point of ‘resonance’.  Next week we will move on to seeing it in the context of the many ‘duopolies’ which make up the multiple facets of human life