Why mysticism? Evelyn Underhill, a fascinating and slightly forgotten figure, who did so much to popularize mysticism in the early 20^th century, defines it as “experience in its most intense form.” My question to you is simple: wouldn’t you like to have a taste of this intensity? Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness, both your life and those of the creatures that surround you? If so, it might be worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can freshen, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.

Mysticism is not primarily a theoretical issue. It is not just a question of an intellectual belief in the existence of God as some kind of metaphysical postulate which can be affirmed or disputed. Rather, mysticism is existential and practical. It is—and this can serve as a rough and ready definition—the cultivation of practices which allow you to free yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings and see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically.

What I am calling ecstasy is a way of surpassing the self, of being held outside the confines of your head and the feeling of delight, pleasure or what Brian Eno calls “idiot glee” that accompanies that experience. It is something that perhaps we knew better in childhood, especially in the experience of play, but from which we have abdicated in adolescence and our overlong adultescence. Adulthood is the abdication of ecstasy. We long to return to that childlike state, but we fail because we get too caught up on ourselves. We are ensnared by ourselves. We are riveted to ourselves. We’re too stuck on us.

But there are areas of human experience that allow us to push outside the sticky self towards something larger, something vaster, something full of vibrancy and maybe a sheer, mad joy at the fact of life and the world. This pushing outside is what religious practice at its best does. It is what art at its noblest can open in us. It is what poetry can point us towards. It is also what can (if we are really lucky) take place in our sexual lives and arguably what drives the desire for intoxication, of whatever kind. We can think of such experiences as forms of surrender. One gives up all desire for control, for dominion over oneself and others, and freely submits.

In such moments, and they are instances of extraordinary vulnerability and exposure, the self fades away into a larger and more capacious environment or space for being. Such surrender takes place particularly powerfully in the experience of music. Mysticism is about evoking and opening us up to such experiences, limitless experiences of aliveness and intensity.

Mysticism is a way of describing an existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self. It is about releasement and detachment, what it might mean to lead a released existence, a fluid openness, a loose intensity, where both the concepts of mind and world or the soul and God dissolve into something altogether stranger and yet simpler: an experience of freedom which is not freedom of the will, but freedom from the will.

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Breath is the original form of “spirit.” The philosopher’s “I think therefore I am,” might be more properly conceived as “I breathe and thus it is.” Consciousness is a limited and unhelpfully restricted and dualistic way of conceiving what William James calls “the stream of life,” a stream that embraces both the breath of our thoughts and the vast, slow-breathing cosmos that enfolds us.

Ecstasy is what it feels like to be alive when we push away the sadness that clings to us. And sadness does cling to us. Reality presses in on us from all sides with a relentless force, a violence, which drains our energy and dissipates our capacity for belief and for joy. The world deafens us with its noise; our eyes sting from the ever-enlarging incoherence of information and disinformation. We all feel, we all live, within the poverty of contemporary experience. This is a heavy time, a leaden time.

What mysticism proposes is an antidote to sadness and leadenness cultivated through practices of radical attention. And I think we are in desperate need of such practices. As T.S Eliot said, we are distracted from distraction by distraction. In Hugh of Saint Victor in the twelfth century, the mystical life is linked to reading, meditation, prayer, composition and contemplation (lectio, meditatio, oratio, operatio and contemplatio). But everything begins with the practice of close reading, what was called lectio divina, divine or inspired reading, the prayerful study of scripture. There is and has to be a dimension of discipline to reading, where the act of studying pushes aside whatever stale and dull monologue is running through one’s head and opens us to that which is outside and beyond the self. This pushing aside of the self is what Simone Weil called de-creation, the undoing of the creature in us in order to participate in something greater than us, whether that is thought of in religious terms or not.

In my view, it is mystical to let a book or books that one loves take one over so completely that one is ventriloquized by them. I have spent my life doing this. Reading as closely and carefully as possible, and then making careful notes and slowly forming sentences. The grappling with difficult texts can be unforgiving work. It is hard and often feels vain and pointless. But it is my somewhat naïve belief that close and sustained reading, and the attentive discipline that it requires and teaches us, can save us from the slough of despond in which we often wallow. Close reading can allow us to push ourselves aside and find some resonance in a text that speaks beyond the self and which holds us there, outside our heads, in the clear middle distance of transcendence.

And if close reading isn’t the most felicitous way for you to exercise disciplined radical attention, then try listening intently, really hearing, or observing a phenomenon as closely as possible, or just watching the wind play softly in the leafy tree tops for an hour. Perhaps something will open in you and you will truly see and hear. That’s all the mysticism we need. And it costs nothing.