mysticism?

somewhere along the way this blog was bound to shift a gear or two and get away, at least on occasion, from my musings on my own mental state. that's probably a good thing, as anyone reading this thing is likely bored to death of the topic, and i myself weary of it from time to time. that said, this was not an easy thing for me to do - i've sat and written and rewritten and mulled over whether to begin a second blog instead in order to keep this one purely about the depression experience. in the end, i have decided that had i really, deep down, wanted this to be about the depression experience i would have called it 'the depression experience'. instead, i went with 'nothing to see here', so obviously i wanted this to be an open forum for all things me. yes, that's self-deprecating. and funny. admit it.

in any case, the thing that has been pulling at me the last day or so is the mystical experience and how it all works. or, more to the point, what it is that might make it not work. why is it that some people can do it and some can't? there are those who would argue that anyone can, and i suppose they're probably right, but there is psychological and psychiatric genetic research being done that suggest there is an inherited component to one's religiosity, a notion i find both repugnant and compelling. i've admittedly not read too much on the subject thus far, but i would not be surprised if i were to discover that it is ultimately not the religiosity that is at issue, but the ability to feel the presence of god (please feel free to use whatever term you like here - i will use god because it's the term i find falls immediately to hand and because it's very, very short. and i am lazy). what i am getting at is the idea that one's religiosity is not necessarily defined by one's genes, but by one's ability to have a mystical experience that allows one to be religious.

obviously there are other factors in play. i'll be the first to admit (and accuse) that not every religious person has any ability at all to feel any mystical experience. in fact, there may even at some point be an inverse relationship (witness pedophile priests, thieving pastors and whole hate-mongering congregations). but at the base, beginner level, doesn't it make sense that without a predisposition to feeling the presence of god one is less likely to be involved in any religion and therefore be 'less religious'? and stop and look around at your own circle. if you look at everyone you know does it seem like the more analytical and less emotive someone is, the less likely that person is to be a member of a religion? and is the converse true?

i touched on my reasoning for this train of thought in an earlier post. i don't know that i am necessarily on the 'genetically predisposed to be religious' list. i don't meditate well. i don't pray well. the corporate worship experience does not open me to an experience with the almighty and i am not expecting any divine visitations anytime soon. but when i play there's something that happens, and so i wonder if we all really do have some way to tap into that flow, and if it's just a little more difficult for some than others.

to be certain, we haven't made it any easier. the ages of reason and analysis have subsumed the age of experience and art and mysticism for so long now that our modern society has little to no way for someone to gain a mystical insight without great effort. even those who may be more prone to those experiences have few outlets into which they can plug, and the available outlets are frequently unattractive for reasons of bigotry, exclusivity, threat of violence, fear of judgment, hypocrisy or just age-old boring traditionalism. in older cultures, mysticism was part and parcel of life. it was what was real. our own advancements in science and rational thought have killed our ability to believe in anything beyond that which we can touch, and without that ability we are even less able to open ourselves to any religious experience because we are less willing, and there are things that simply must be believed to be seen, not the other way around.

it strikes me that we as a human race were born into experience with the innate ability to have that mystical experience. most these days think that early cultures' belief systems are simply signs of their inability to rationalize and their lack of scientific knowledge, ghost stories to explain away the universe around them, and perhaps there's something to that. but every step we take down the rabbit hole of quantum physics and string theories suggests that perhaps our own scientifically-based ideas make less sense than we think, that the picture is much, much larger than we can see, and so i wonder if maybe we have, with all our learning, unlearned something that might be more fundamentally necessary and more fundamentally true than all the science we can muster. after all, if we find through the current trends in physics that there are myriad universes and dimensions and that every choice we make creates a fork in the road that generates a new pair of existences, doesn't that lend credence to the hindu and buddhist notions that reality is but a dream and the true reality lies beneath it, underpinning it while at the same time undermining it? and every time we turn around we find that there's another variable we missed in the equation, and we have to manufacture dark matter, background energies and rays and constants and other artificial balancers just to make the math work. why is something as creatively-named yet as unobservable as 'dark matter' more valid than a god experience or explanation?

i think perhaps that we have, in our zealotry for science and reason, fallen easy prey to plato's allegory of the cave - every bit as easy prey as any primitive belief system. and i don't mean to suggest that any particular religion is necessarily more accurate or has walked around the rock to discover the fire and shadows. but i personally find a lot of beauty in the acceptance of the fact that we are in the cave and that perhaps there is a different explanation than what we see. that acceptance can be born of the ability to feel something larger than just one's neurons firing and the effects of group-think. when i design something there is a feeling more of 'uncovering' something that already exists and that wants to be revealed. when i play music there is a feeling of going to someplace where that music already is and bringing it back for others to hear. these feelings may be illusions, certainly. but they may also be factual, or they may be beautiful analogies for some universal mechanism we will never understand.

this existence is not a simple place, and there is far more in play than quarks and leptons. even science admits that. and so i wonder if, in discounting the mystical experience, we are discounting something as important as science. hell, i sometimes wonder if we are discounting something more important! but my greater concern is that we are training and breeding out of ourselves the ability to experience that deeper world. i worry that we are actively destroying our own ability to relate to the universe around us on its own natural terms. instead of dealing in the language the universe natively speaks, have we created esperanto in an effort to do it better? are we speaking a language that is dead before it ever was alive? i don't know. but i do know that human history is filled with wonderful allegory and myth, and each step we take in our modern society seems to remove us further from our own roots. we are a world full of people who cannot understand our own religion because its intellectualism is beyond our capacity, and we are losing the ability to believe in the simpler explanations, dammit.