And then what I said was this, or something like it: Mysticism in traditional terms privileges, and tries to open the individual up through specific ritual practices to, the experience of the divine. To experience the divine, in these terms, is set apart from ordinary experience–so, one must practice asceticism, take hallucinogens, chant, spin, sit for hours, and then, and thus, enter an abnormal state: ecstasy, realization, transcendence, purification.
But these states, exoticised and idealized, presume that ordinary experience is static, not real, and impure in some way. The mystic feels an intense need to transcend the world, the ordinary, the domestic, the mundane, the self. The mystic feels an intense separation from the divine, and a need to dissolve the boundary between self and the source of light and otherness. This longing is emblematic of the escapist tendency in humans which, at its most interesting, causes mysticism and art, and at its most dogmatic and vile, causes orthodoxy and fundamentalism. I do not intend, as a domestic mystic, to rail against mystic tendencies, certainly not against all art; even religion has its place sociologically.
0 Responses to “Another argument for the ordinary”