Mysticism

Abstract

It was in a nondogmatic, mystical tradition that Huxley found a spirituality to supplement literature and science. His career cannot be understood without recognizing why mysticism attracted him and what it meant for him to glimpse mystical enlightenment. However, anyone who proposes to talk about mystical experience immediately faces difficulties. In a sense, unless already known, the experience can never be understood. To define it is to miss its essence. William James decided that a main characteristic of the mystical experience was its ineffability (Varieties 380), which hardly encourages one to probe any further for a definition. However, Huxley did offer the following fairly comprehensive description.

I take it that the mystical experience is essentially the being aware of and, while the experience lasts, being identified with a form of pure consciousness, of unstructured transpersonal consciousness which lies, so to speak, upstream from the ordinary discursive consciousness of everyday. It is non-egotistic consciousness, a kind of formless and timeless consciousness, which seems to underlie the consciousness of the separate ego in time. (Human 212)