The Mystical Experience – Alan Watts

when I use the word mysticism I'm referring to a kind of experience a kind of shall we say state of consciousness which seems to be as prevalent among human beings as measles it's something that simply happens and we don't know why it happens and although there are all sorts of techniques which claimed to be able to promote it and which are more or less successful in doing so and sometimes rather less than more nevertheless there is this peculiar thing that happens to people and it's been recorded as far back in time as we have any recording at all and that is coming over people the peculiarly convincing Sensation that there are ordinary sense of individuality of personal identity is transcended and the individual suddenly feels an experience that actually it could be described from a number of quite different points of view but we could add up these dominant characteristics that instead of the ordinary feeling that I as an individual confront a world that is foreign to me that is not me in this kind of experience I find myself to be of one and the same nature or identity as the world outside me in other words I suddenly feel no longer a stranger in the world but as if the external world were my own body the next aspect of the feeling is even more difficult to assimilate to our ordinary practical intelligence but a very overwhelming feeling that everything that happens everything I have ever done everything anybody else has ever done was part of our harmonious design that there is no error at all and that's the sort of thing I'm referring to now you see I'm not talking about a philosophy I'm not talking about a rationalization some sort of theory that somebody cooked up in order to explain the world and make it seem a tolerable place to live in I'm talking about a rather whimsical unpredictable experience that suddenly hits people and it includes this element of feeling the total harmoniousness of everything now I realize that those words can carry with them a sort of Sentimental Feeling a sort of Pollyanna feeling [Music] there are various religions society today which try to inculcate in you the belief that everything is a harmonious Unity you know things like Christian Science or the unity movement and so on they want to to make a kind of propaganda for one to believe and through believing to feel that everything is harmonious now to my mind that is a kind of pseudo mysticism because it's an attempt to make the Tail Wag the Dog to make the the effect produce the cause because this sensation of things being harmonious somehow never brought about by insisting to yourself that that is so because when you do that when you would say to yourself all things are light all things are God all things are beautiful Etc actually by doing that you're implying that they're not because you wouldn't be saying all the stuff if you really knew it to be true so the the sensation of a kind of universal Harmony cannot come to us when it is sought when we look for it as something to be an escape from the way we actually feel or to compensate for the way we actually feel it's a thing that comes out of the blue and when it comes out of the blue just like hiccups come out of the blue or something like that it's overwhelmingly convincing and it stands as the foundation for most of Mankind's profound philosophical mystical metaphysical and religious ideas someone in other words to whom this sort of thing has happened and as I said before it strikes us as measles May strike us someone to whom this sort of thing has happened can't restrain himself when it has happened and he has to get up and tell everybody about it and alas he becomes the founder of a religion because people say look at that band how happy he is what conviction he has he has no doubts he seems to be sure in everything he does you see that's the wonderful thing about a great human being he's like an animal or a flower see when a flower buds and the bud goes pop and opens it has no hesitation or doubts about it but when a young woman appears in society as a debutante you know she's not quite sure if she's going to come off and she appears on the stage of society with some doubts in her mind therefore all appearances of this kind of a rather sickly nature but when the Bird Sings or the chicken's egg breaks there's no doubt about it at all and so in the same way when somebody has an experience of this kind he just has to tell everybody about it because you see he sees everybody around him looking dreadfully serious looking as if they had a problem looking as if the act of living were extremely difficult but from his standpoint the person who's had this experience he feels that they look funny that they don't understand that they there isn't any problem at all that he has seen from where he stands that the meaning of being alive is just being alive that is to say I look at the color of your hair in the shape of your eyebrow and I understand that that is the point that's what we're all here for and it's so plain and it's so obvious so simple and yet here is everybody rushing around in a great panic as if it were necessary for them to achieve something beyond all that and the funny thing is they're not quite sure what it is but they are devilishly intent upon it after that thing and so to the person in the State of Consciousness which I call Mystical that all seems very weird very absurd but it's not something that you criticize in an unkindly way who don't say those damn fools those idiots you say it's Such a Pity that they don't see it