Mysticism reduces one’s relationship with God to one’s own experience of God. It belongs to a more general tendency to reduce all relationship with being (and beings) to one’s own experience of being (and beings). Like all religiosities, including, especially, fundamentalism, mysticism can even take forms that dispense with God. It goes like this: “I experience something that points beyond my experience, and that experience-beyond-experience is a kind of revelation of a mystery: the mystery of inexhaustible moreness.” Spiritual-but-not-religious Nones fall under this category.

Mysticism takes root in souls who have nothing against which to contrast this reflexive comprehensive mystical response: “Experience… as opposed to what?”

I can describe mysticism because mysticism is a personal vice of my own: O God, I pray to “you”, be way over there, blessing me and this world with your opalescent existential backglow. I ask nothing of you, except that you ask nothing of me. Make me unspoken promises that can never be broken, but infuse my life with an enchanting hopefulness, which is hope for nothing in particular. Drape my life in a protecting veil of the gentlest contempt toward all who expect from me what I give only to you. Amen.

To tease out the truth of a mystic, to get a glimpse of their soul, need something from them, ask them for something, even something very simple, and notice what ensues. Parallel lines are held apart by a sacred void. Thou shalt not obligate.

Mystics want freedom, and will pay whatever price they must for their redemption from obligation. But this payment for freedom does not redeem. It isolates.

Martin Buber says this:

That there is no justification for invoking the “are one” is obvious for anyone who reads the Gospel according to John without skipping and with an open mind. It is really nothing less than the Gospel of the pure relationship. There are truer things here than the familiar mystic verse: “I am you, and you are I.” The father and the son, being consubstantial—we may say: God and man, being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship that, from God to man, is called mission and commandment; from man to God, seeing and hearing; between both, knowledge and love. And in this relationship the son, although the father dwells and works in him, bows before him that is “greater” and prays to him.

All modern attempts to reinterpret this primal actuality of dialogue and to make of it a relationship of the I to the self or something of that sort, as if it were a process confined to man’s self-sufficient inwardness, are vain and belong to the abysmal history of deactualization.

— But mysticism? It relates how unity within duality feels. Have we any right to doubt the faithfulness of this testimony?

— I know not only of one but of two kinds of events in which one is no longer aware of any duality. Mysticism sometimes confounds them, as I, too, did at one time.

First, the soul may become one. This event occurs not between man and God but in man. All forces are concentrated into the core, everything that would distract them is pulled in, and the being stands alone in itself and jubilates, as Paracelsus put it, in its exaltation. This is a man’s decisive moment. Without this he is not fit for the work of the spirit. With this — it is decided deep down whether this means preparation or sufficient satisfaction. Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter — wholly successful only now — with mystery and perfection. But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction. Everything along our way is decision — intentional, dimly sensed, or altogether secret — but this one, deep down, is the primally secret decision, pregnant with the most powerful destiny.

The other event is that unfathomable kind of relational act itself in which one has the feeling that Two have become One: “one and one made one, bare shineth in bare.” I and You drown; humanity that but now confronted the deity is absorbed into it; glorification, deification, universal unity have appeared. But when one returns into the wretchedness of daily turmoil, transfigured and exhausted, and with a knowing heart reflects on both, is one not bound to feel that Being is split, with one part abandoned to hopelessness? What help is it to my soul that it can be transported again from this world into that unity, when this world itself has, of necessity, no share whatever in that unity — what does all “enjoyment of God” profit a life rent in two? If that extravagantly rich heavenly Moment has nothing to do with my poor earthly moment — what is it to me as long as I still have to live on earth — must in all seriousness still live on earth? That is the way to understand those masters who renounced the raptures of the ecstasy of “unification.”

Which was no unification.

And then he describes the precise error Julius Evola made in his starkly solipsistic book on sex, where he claims a woman’s essence is revealed to a man in the moment of climax:

Those human beings may serve as a metaphor who in the passion of erotic fulfillment are so carried away by the miracle of the embrace that all knowledge of I and You drowns in the feeling of a unity that neither exists nor can exist. What the ecstatic calls unification is the rapturous dynamics of the relationship; not a unity that has come into being at this moment in world time, fusing I and You, but the dynamics of the relationship itself which can stand before the two carriers of this relationship, although they confront each other immovably, and cover the eyes of the enraptured.’ What we find here is a marginal® exorbitance of the act of relation: the relationship itself in its vital unity is felt so vehemently that its members pale in the process: its life predominates so much that the I and the You between whom it is established are forgotten.

I will conclude now with an image (from despair.com) that I have used more than once in project post-mortems and in summaries of my long and twisting career path.