In healthy people, an awareness of self is not lost during this time of invasion by and fusion with what feels like an independent agency. At full force, the mystical experience is transfixing, tending to paralyze movement and speech, and at the same time bringing with it the capacity for clear sensory and sensory-integrative lucidity. This new seeing brings previously unnoticed things to attention and makes old things new. Perhaps most striking is the passive (unsought) experience of the unification of erstwhile disparate, apparently unrelated thoughts and feelings. The yield can be the sudden emergence of deep relationships between apparently very different constructs, beliefs and formalisms leading to unanticipated and unsought integrative connections. In mathematics, this experience can lead to entirely new kinds of theorems and proofs; in the physical and biological sciences, a previously unseen organization of the data generating new global relationships and potential scientific laws. In our spiritual life, the ineffable richness of the direct experience of God.
Mysticism-negative interpretations of these experiences have always been attendant. To the extent that the mystic’s inward turn is seen as a detachment and implicit derogation of the external, consensually real world, it is often seen as alienating from established institutions of religion and government. Psychoanalytic practitioners may label it a regression to primary narcissism. Most churches tend to discourage its practice as counter to the dominant social hierarchy and _ its governance. Governments pass laws against its practice and manifestations, a current example being modern Chinese governmental reactions to the Tibetan Buddhism of the Dalai Lama and the yogic practices of the Falon Gong. Agencies of established society such as the institutions of licensed medical practice make the dominance of the inner world of mysticism subject to diagnoses ranging from the narcissistic character disorders to interpretations of the reported extraordinary experiences as manifestations of schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder or temporal lobe epilepsy. Rejection and fear of the transcendent states lead to uninformed and politicized anti-narcotic laws, grouping heroine and cocaine with the entheogenic (recall: engendering connection with the sacred within) agents such as
the Huichol Indian’s peyote and the Amazonian Indian’s yage, obstruct and socially
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