Almost all of us know what a peak experience feels like. For some people, it’s climbing mountains or surfing; for others, it’s an intense meditation practice, or maybe it’s as simple as that sensation you get on the floor at a great concert.
Call it a flow state or transcendence or whatever you want, but it’s a kind of ecstasy most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. And it’s something people have written about and explored for centuries. Indeed, there’s a whole tradition of mystical thinking that tries to make sense of these experiences and offer blueprints for achieving them.
Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at the New School in Manhattan and the author of a fascinating new book called Mysticism. Although he isn’t a religious person in any conventional sense, Critchley is very interested in mystical experiences and the history of mystical literature. His work is open-minded and curious about this world in a way that is quite rare in professional philosophy.
I recently invited Critchley on The Gray Area to talk about why he thinks mysticism — or what someone he quotes in the book calls “experience in its most intense form” — isn’t about beliefs or ideas or rote rituals. Instead, he argues, it’s about how we use our attention and how we break free of habits and default modes of being in the world that make it hard for us to get outside of ourselves. And that, really, is what this conversation is about: What can we do to get out of our heads so that we can see and feel things that we otherwise can’t see and feel?
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean Illing
How do you describe mysticism?
I don’t want to ask you to just define mysticism because it’s not that simple. But let’s wrap our arms around it a little bit. You discuss a lot of different ways people have understood mysticism in the book. How do you describe it? What are some of the more useful ways to think about it?
Simon Critchley
There’s a lovely short definition by Evelyn Underhill that I begin the book with, which is “experience in its most intense form.” So pushing yourself aside in order to be open to a lived intensity of experience, an experience of ecstasy. That’s the core of it for me. The other thing is that mysticism is not a religion; it’s a tendency within religion, everything that we can call religion. Which means that for as long as there have been human beings, there is something like religion. And at the core of that is something like mystical practice.
Sean Illing
How much of the mystical experience is really about shutting down the thinking mind?
Simon Critchley
A lot of it is about shutting down the thinking mind. It’s about pushing yourself out of the way as much as possible. I mean, I begin the book with Hamlet. And I say that Hamlet is the anti-mystic par excellence. Hamlet is entirely in his own head, and it’s the most intelligent head you could imagine being inside. He knows everything. He can see everything from 17 different angles, and he can soliloquize with the most extraordinary elegance and eloquence. But what that does in his case is it kills the capacity for love. And it kills the capacity for love for his girlfriend and partner Ophelia, for his mother, and for the world. The world is a sterile promontory for Hamlet. So Hamlet is what it’s like to be inside your head.
So the question is then, “How do you push that aside?” How do you push that self that we think is us, that actually is blocking our view of what we really should be seeing? How do you push that away? And the mystics are people that have tried to do that, who have given us kind of itineraries of ways of doing that where we can kind of leave ourselves behind, de-create ourselves as Simone Weil says, in order to undo ourselves, in order to open ourselves to something else.
There’s a great line from Marguerite Porete, where she talks about, “I have to hack and hew away at myself in order to make a space that’s large enough for love to enter in.” To hack and hew. There’s a lot of hacking and hewing in mysticism, that the self is something that has to be kind of torn apart, torn open. And if you can do that, then you can make a space that’s large enough for love to enter in.
Sean Illing
I kept thinking about Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground while reading your book and one of the opening lines is from the protagonist, who says “I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real actual disease.” That whole book is like a case study in how someone can be completely undone by their own thoughts, and I’ve really come to believe that being self-absorbed in that way, being trapped in your own mind in that way, is what hell actually looks like for most people.
Simon Critchley
Oh, absolutely. I don’t believe in the existence of a place called “Hell” where most people are going to go, but I burn in hell insofar as I am a prisoner to myself. Insofar as I’m locked in this head, locked in these preoccupations, these doubts, this second-guessing, I’m in hell every day.
Sean Illing
So is the idea here that when you can quiet your mind, when you can detach from the ego, there’s a part of the world or a way of being in the world that becomes available to you that otherwise isn’t?
Simon Critchley
Yes, I think that is it. “Quieting the mind” is a very good way of putting it. It’s about quietening the mind and also trying to escape the curse of reflection. The underground man is someone who is cursed with ratiocination. He’s cursed with reflection. And to quieten the mind means to let that go and to open yourself to find what one of my favorite mystical writers, Meister Eckhart, calls “releasement.” Which is a releasement from the self, a releasement from the ego, to be out there with what is, and to stand there with what is, and not to be inside one’s head. And that means looking, attending, having cultivated practices of attention.
Sean Illing
And these people you describe in the book, how do they get here? What do they do? Is it fasting, meditation, prayer, intense reading? What are the practices?
Simon Critchley
Everything really has to begin with reading. The mystics were not just these people having these strange extreme experiences. They were people for whom all of this began with the reading of texts. So in many ways, the easiest way of describing how to become a mystic is by reading, by allowing your attention to be genuinely taken by something, a text that you are engaged with, and to really give yourself over to that. And not to necessarily always ask questions about whether it’s true, whether it makes sense, but to try and enter into its world. Of course you can get to that state by the adoption of a series of bodily and spiritual practices and then open yourself up. But everything really begins with reading.
Sean Illing
How do you think about the relationship between mysticism and love? Is the experience of true love, the act of true love, itself a kind of mystical practice?
Simon Critchley
Yes, I think it is.
Sean Illing
In what way?
Simon Critchley
Well, it would be love of something which is not you, love of something which is outside you. So to give oneself over to someone, to something else, completely. Another way of thinking about it is to give what you do not have and to receive that over which you have no power. So I cannot give love. I can say “I love you,” but love has the strange quality where I have to pledge myself in love. But for someone else to experience that love, or for me to get close to that love, it’s not something that I have a certain quantity of in my mind. I have to give what I do not have. And then if I’m fortunate, I can receive love as a form of grace, which is something over which I have no power. I can be in love, I can receive love, I can get love back. But it’s not in my control. So the practice of love turns on a renunciation of control.
Sean Illing
So much of this mystical thinking points to the ultimate emptiness of a cynical, endlessly questioning intelligence, which in the end just draws you deeper and deeper into yourself. And that’s a road to nowhere. It’s certainly not a road to fulfillment.
Simon Critchley
Yes, and I think that’s often what gets paraded or presented to us and applauded as being “smart.” And that seems to be the most important criterion we can use to decide whether someone should get a job or not get a job or be admitted into some institution. We want to know whether they’re smart. But there’s an emptiness to it. There’s a howling void at the core of it. And it does require, I think, work. Interesting work requires a kind of idiocy, a kind of stupidity, which I think is important in the book.
One of the things I do at the end is to pick up this idea from the musician Brian Eno, who talked of “idiot glee.” Idiot glee is a kind of sheer joy at the mad fact of the world. Eno is the inventor of various new categories of music, including ambient and generative music, and an all-round total genius. And the idea there is that we have to just be kind of happy idiots in a way and not be imprisoned in our smartness. This takes us back to Hamlet. Hamlet is smart. Hamlet is the ultimate expression of a cynical questioning intelligence, and it’s fun to watch. It’s extraordinary to watch. But it’s hell to be and it’s hell to be around. And the idea that we should valorize that above other forms of being human seems to me extremely, extremely strange.
Sean Illing
You say that mysticism mostly lives on in the modern world as an aesthetic experience. What does that mean?
Simon Critchley
If we had to put it into shorthand, it would be that the mystic becomes the romantic poet who gives us the view of the whole. Which is good news in the sense that the kind of experience that we associate with mysticism does survive in things like poetry and music, but it loses all of its institutional framing. It loses its church. It just becomes some guy writing poems in a room.
But for me, the aesthetic experience that most captures mysticism is the experience of music. And also a lot of things that we were talking about — about a quietening of the mind, a sense of leaving oneself behind, of giving up that cynical questioning intelligence — all of those things for me can be had very directly in the experience of listening to the music that I love.
Sean Illing
My favorite line in the book might be when you say, “It’s impossible to be an atheist while listening to the music that you love.” I’m not exactly sure what you mean, but I also know exactly what you mean and anyone who loves music will know what you mean, too. But what’s actually going on there?
Simon Critchley
Yeah, that’s it. You know exactly what I mean. I think it’s an incredible opening of the mind, and it’s hard to describe. For me, the world opened up through music, through pop music, and it gave me a vocabulary. It gave me a way of not being me, but of looking at something else. I talk about some of those experiences in relation to early ’70s Krautrock, and some punk stuff, and I end up with Nick Cave and people like that.
There’s an experience of the sacred in music that just is, and I think it’s why we judge people with bad musical tastes so harshly. It’s why it’s really unforgivable. “Okay, so you voted for Trump or whoever. Okay, fair enough. I’ll try to understand you. But you like this album? That’s unforgivable!” And if someone doesn’t appreciate something that I really love musically, then I judge them. I think, “Okay, you don’t get that? Well, good luck with the rest of your life.”
But how does it do it? How does music do that? Well, the philosopher Schopenhauer thought music resonated with the will, the unconscious will. There was an attunement between us and the world through music. Nietzsche had similar sorts of ideas, namely that music is the highest art form because it resonates with the deepest level of us. I think something like that is probably true.
Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
