AI transcript
0:00:06 I’m Ashley Seaford, and I host Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice
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0:00:14 For the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of hand-wringing about Governor Ron DeSantis’
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0:01:28 The sheer feeling of aliveness.
0:01:33 We all know what that is, even though it comes in many different forms.
0:01:38 Maybe it’s going for a long run at night, or free climbing a mountain, or an intense
0:01:40 meditation practice.
0:01:46 Or that sensation you get when you’re on the floor by the stage at a great concert.
0:01:50 Call it a flow state, or religious experience, or whatever you want.
0:01:56 But it’s a kind of ecstasy almost all of us have experienced at some point in our lives.
0:02:01 People have been having experiences like this for centuries, and in previous eras they called
0:02:03 it a mystical experience.
0:02:09 In the modern world, a word like “mystical” feels weird, or out of place.
0:02:13 Maybe when you hear it, you think of a fringe religious figure.
0:02:16 Or some kind of spiritual guru.
0:02:21 Or if you’re less charitable, maybe you think of one of those crystal peddling influencers
0:02:23 on Instagram.
0:02:29 But the study of mysticism, this feeling of intense experience that I’m talking about,
0:02:33 has been the focus of philosophers and theologians for a very long time.
0:02:39 So what can we learn from the tradition of mystical thought?
0:02:46 May it help us live better and more meaningful and more present lives in the 21st century.
0:02:55 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Great Area.
0:02:57 Today’s guest is Simon Critchley.
0:03:01 He’s a writer and a philosopher at the New School in New York, and the author of a new
0:03:04 book called Mysticism.
0:03:10 Critchley is not a religious person, but he’s interested in mystical experiences, and what
0:03:15 I appreciate about his work is that it’s not judgmental.
0:03:21 It is open-minded and curious and exploratory in a way that is frankly all too rare in the
0:03:25 world of philosophy, which is what makes this book so enjoyable.
0:03:31 For Critchley, mysticism isn’t the question of religious belief, nor is it about ideas
0:03:32 and arguments.
0:03:37 It’s about how we use our attention and how we break free of habits and default modes
0:03:42 of being in the world that make it hard for us to get outside of ourselves.
0:03:45 And that really is what this conversation is about.
0:03:50 What can we do to get out of our head so that we can see and feel things that we otherwise
0:04:01 can’t see and feel?
0:04:03 I’m Simon Critchley.
0:04:04 Welcome to the show.
0:04:06 Sean, thank you very much for having me.
0:04:07 I’m very happy to be here.
0:04:13 Well, let’s get into mysticism, and I don’t want to ask you to just define mysticism because
0:04:17 it’s not that simple, but let’s wrap our arms around it a little bit.
0:04:22 You discuss a lot of different ways people have understood mysticism in the book.
0:04:24 How do you describe it?
0:04:30 What are some of the more useful ways to think about it?
0:04:34 There’s a lovely short definition by Evelyn Underhill that I begin the book with, which
0:04:36 is experience in its most intense form.
0:04:44 So pushing yourself aside in order to be open to a lived intensity of experience, an experience
0:04:47 of ecstasy, that’s the core of it for me.
0:04:52 The other thing about mysticism is that mysticism, so mysticism is not a religion, it’s a tendency
0:04:59 within religion, everything that we can call religion, which means that for as long as there
0:05:05 have been human beings, there is something like religion and at the core of that is something
0:05:07 like mystical practice.
0:05:13 It attracts an audience, so there’s something essentially popular and even populist about
0:05:14 mysticism.
0:05:22 I think in part because of its roots in religion, a lot of people today, especially secular
0:05:33 rationalist types, will dismiss mysticism as the realm of delusion and irrationality.
0:05:36 You clearly think that is a mistake, why?
0:05:37 And I agree by the way.
0:05:38 Yeah.
0:05:42 I mean, the word mystic has become a term of abuse, right?
0:05:49 So if you’re giving a talk in an academic context or not necessarily an academic context
0:05:54 and someone says that’s mysticism, then that’s a refutation, right there, that’s the end
0:05:55 of the conversation.
0:05:57 That’s mysticism, you’re a mystic.
0:06:09 And so mysticism has become a term of abuse and that connects to a much longer, deeper
0:06:16 story about the nature of philosophy in the modern world.
0:06:26 And I think the philosophers, I mean, the key figure here is Emmanuel Kant, who kind
0:06:33 of sets up modern philosophy, really, he’s the first philosopher who’s also an academic
0:06:39 before that philosophers have been courtiers or doctors and things like that.
0:06:52 But Kant is engaged in this critical, rational activity to draw tight the realm of faith
0:06:59 in order to make science be reconciled with the experience of faith and freedom.
0:07:04 And what has to be kept out of the way very clearly for Kant are those people that he refers
0:07:11 to as spirit seers, enthusiast fanatics, yes his wonderful term in German, Schwermerei, kind
0:07:13 of enthusiasm, fanaticism.
0:07:19 So philosophy then becomes this critical, rational enterprise that’s set up in order
0:07:23 to protect people against the threat of mysticism.
0:07:29 And that’s very much how it’s continued in its academic and non-academic guises.
0:07:35 That does a number of things that reduces philosophy to a very rationalistic, critical
0:07:38 enterprise, it really narrows it down.
0:07:44 It makes most of the history of philosophy and the history of thought unrecognizable
0:07:53 because the divine has been baked into philosophy from the beginning in Plato’s dialogues, Plato’s
0:07:58 Fadros in Symposium, it’s all about divine visions and even Aristotle, the highest goal
0:08:00 of ethics is divine life.
0:08:07 So it makes the history of philosophy unrecognizable and it really narrows down philosophical practice
0:08:10 to this very kind of small area of activity.
0:08:16 Well, I like the way I’ve heard you put it before that the dominant strain of philosophy,
0:08:23 modern philosophy became obsessed with asking whether something is true and became disinterested
0:08:27 in the question, why is it meaningful?
0:08:32 Exactly, there’s a brilliant pair of essays by John Stuart Mill.
0:08:38 The first one is on Bentham, Jeremy Bentham, who was his teacher and the Benthamite tendency
0:08:42 reduces philosophy to the question, is it true?
0:08:48 Of anything that’s presented to you, any doctrine, is it true?
0:08:56 The other side is Coleridge and the Coleridgean question of anything according to John Stuart
0:09:01 Mill is what is the meaning of it, what is the meaning of it?
0:09:03 And these two questions are both important questions.
0:09:09 If we’re presented with a proposition, whatever it might be, then we can ask of it, is it
0:09:16 true or is this delusional, fine?
0:09:23 And we expect the area of, say, scientific activity to be governed by a concern for truth.
0:09:29 But if that’s all that there is, then it loses this whole dimension of meaning and that’s
0:09:34 often been sidelined or overlooked in philosophy in the last couple hundred years.
0:09:41 How much of the mystical experience is really about shutting down the thinking mind?
0:09:44 Oh, yeah, a lot of it is about shutting down the thinking mind.
0:09:50 Yeah, it’s about pushing yourself out of the way as much as possible.
0:10:03 I begin the book with Hamlet and I say that Hamlet is the anti-mystic par excellence and
0:10:09 Hamlet is entirely in his own head and it’s the most intelligent head you could imagine
0:10:10 being inside.
0:10:12 He knows everything.
0:10:18 He can see everything from 17 different angles and he can still acquire with the most extraordinary
0:10:25 elegance and eloquence and chatter on.
0:10:32 But what that does in his case is it kills the capacity for love and it kills the capacity
0:10:38 for love for his girlfriend, partner, Ophelia, for his mother and for the world.
0:10:42 The world is a sterile promontory for Hamlet.
0:10:49 So Hamlet is what it’s like at its very best to be inside your head.
0:10:52 So the question is then how do you push that aside?
0:11:00 How do you push that self that we think is us, that actually is blocking our view to
0:11:02 what we really should be seeing?
0:11:04 How do you push that away?
0:11:10 And the mystics are people that have tried to do that given as kind of itineraries of
0:11:18 ways of doing that, where we can kind of leave ourselves behind, de-create ourselves as Simone
0:11:26 Vape says in order to undo ourselves, in order to open ourselves to something else.
0:11:36 There’s a great line from Marguerite Porrethigan where she talks about, “I have to hack and
0:11:42 hue away at myself in order to make a space that’s large enough for love to enter in,
0:11:44 to hack and hue.”
0:11:48 There’s a lot of hacking and hueing in mysticism that the self is something that has to be
0:11:51 kind of torn apart, torn open.
0:11:56 And if you can do that, then you can make a space that’s large enough for love to enter
0:11:57 in.
0:12:04 You know, what I was thinking about reading your book was Dostoevsky’s notes from Underground.
0:12:05 Oh, yeah.
0:12:06 Yeah.
0:12:13 There’s that opening line where the protagonist says, “I swear to you that to think too much
0:12:17 is a disease, a real actual disease.”
0:12:23 And that whole book is like a case study in how someone can be completely undone by their
0:12:24 own thoughts.
0:12:28 It’s haunted me since I first read it probably 20 years ago.
0:12:34 And it’s a weird thing to say, and I’m pretty sure much smarter people than me have already
0:12:35 made this argument.
0:12:40 But I have really come to believe that being self-absorbed in that way, being trapped in
0:12:44 the self in your own mind, is what hell actually is.
0:12:45 Yes.
0:12:46 Yes.
0:12:47 Oh, absolutely.
0:12:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:12:49 Yeah.
0:12:50 That’s very good, Sean.
0:12:58 Actually, you could say about the existence of hell, which we could talk about.
0:13:05 I don’t believe in the existence of a place called hell where most people are going to
0:13:06 go.
0:13:14 But I burn in hell insofar as I am a prisoner to myself, right, insofar as I’m locked in
0:13:22 this head, locked in these preoccupations, these doubts, this second guessing, the suspicion
0:13:29 that I have, I am burning in hell every day, so how do I push that away?
0:13:37 So is the idea here that when you can quiet your mind, when you can detach from the ego,
0:13:42 there’s a reality, there’s a part of the world or way of being in the world that becomes
0:13:46 available to you, that otherwise isn’t?
0:13:48 Yes, I think that is it.
0:13:50 Quieting the mind is a very good way of putting it.
0:13:59 It’s about, it’s quieting the mind and also trying to escape the curse of reflection.
0:14:06 The underground man is someone who is cursed with raciocination, he’s cursed with reflection.
0:14:17 And to quieten the mind means to let that go and to open yourself to find what one of
0:14:23 my favourite mystical writers, Meister Eckhart, calls a ‘releasement’, which is a ‘releasement’
0:14:30 from the self, a ‘releasement’ from the ego, to be out there with what is and to stand
0:14:37 there with what is and not to, not to be inside one’s head.
0:14:45 And that means looking, attending, attending largely, attending, having cultivated practices
0:14:46 of attention.
0:14:51 And these people you describe in the book, how do they get here?
0:14:52 What do they do?
0:14:57 Is it fasting, meditation, prayer, ritual?
0:15:00 What do they actually do to get there?
0:15:04 Everything really has to begin with reading.
0:15:11 And so the mystics were not just these people having these strange, extreme experiences.
0:15:18 They were people who, for whom all of this began with the reading of texts.
0:15:24 So in many ways, the easiest way of describing how to become a mystic is by reading, by allowing
0:15:33 your attention to be genuinely taken by something, a text that you’re engaged with, and to really
0:15:39 give yourself over to that, and not to necessarily always ask questions about whether it’s true,
0:15:44 whether it makes sense, but to try and enter into its world.
0:15:53 And that was something that was organised by the institutions of, in the case that I’m
0:15:57 dealing with in the book, the organisations of the Christian church, particularly the
0:15:58 monasteries.
0:16:08 So you could get to that state by the adoption of a series of bodily and spiritual practices
0:16:12 and then open yourself up.
0:16:13 But everything really begins with reading.
0:16:15 Yeah, so that would be it.
0:16:16 That’s what you have to do.
0:16:18 Well, done.
0:16:23 I’ll do that before dinner.
0:16:28 Let me ask you about another practice, which you’ve alluded to already, which is love.
0:16:31 And I used the word “practice” deliberately.
0:16:35 You write something very interesting in the book about love, and now I’ll quote you.
0:16:39 You say, “To love is to negate.
0:16:43 Love is a process of stripping away, cutting away, tearing away that opens us up to what
0:16:47 exceeds the self.”
0:16:50 How do you think about this relationship between mysticism and love?
0:16:57 Is the experience of true love, the act of true love itself, a kind of mystical practice?
0:16:58 Yes.
0:16:59 Yes.
0:17:00 In what way?
0:17:06 Well, it would be love, love of something which is not you, love of something which is
0:17:07 outside you.
0:17:16 So to give oneself over to someone, to something else completely, to another way of thinking
0:17:23 about it, is to give what you do not have and to receive that over which you have no
0:17:25 power.
0:17:29 To give what you do not have and to receive that over which you have no power.
0:17:32 So I cannot give love.
0:17:41 I can say I love you, but love has the strange quality of I have to pledge myself in love.
0:17:46 But for someone else to experience that love, or for me to get close to that love, it’s
0:17:51 not something that I have in my, a quantity of it in my mind, I have to give what I do
0:17:52 not have.
0:18:00 And then if I’m fortunate, I can receive love as a form of grace, which is something over
0:18:01 which I have no power.
0:18:07 I can be in love, I can receive love, I can get love back, but it’s not in my control.
0:18:15 So love, you know, really the practice of love turns on a relunciation of control.
0:18:16 That’s really key.
0:18:17 Yeah.
0:18:24 I, you know, you mentioned the French philosopher Simone Weil earlier.
0:18:30 We did an episode about her a couple of years ago and I think she’s one of the great moral
0:18:35 geniuses of the 20th century and she was also a Christian mystic and her ideas are all over
0:18:42 this book and her idea of decreation, which you mentioned earlier, I mean, that emptying
0:18:46 ourselves of ourselves or pushing ourselves out of the picture, I mean, she, for her that
0:18:54 was a really a precondition of loving another person or truly paying attention to another
0:18:57 person, which is really love in a way.
0:19:00 And that is, of course, easier said than done.
0:19:06 I’m not sure how many of us can really do it, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.
0:19:10 No, it doesn’t mean she’s right and it’s about and it’s about waiting for Simone Weil.
0:19:14 It’s about, you can cultivate this practice of love and then you just have to wait, perhaps
0:19:20 there’ll be grace, perhaps there, you can’t predict it, you can’t, you can’t force it.
0:19:27 You can, but you can undo the creature Lee or what I like to say, the critchley in the
0:19:33 sense that, you know, whatever this thing is, this, this lump of flesh that I am and its
0:19:42 preoccupations and its doubts and its stuff, that has to be stripped away and and and and
0:19:51 opened as much as possible in order to, yeah, in order to, in order to love and and then
0:19:53 to and then to wait.
0:20:01 And I think it’s the hardest thing to do is the hardest thing to ask of anybody.
0:20:07 And then the, and then the problem, then the paradox is not the parody, maybe it’s a paradox
0:20:13 is that the last person that Simone Weil was interested in was Simone Weil, she had no interest
0:20:23 in herself, you know, a totally selfless person, a hero, a heroine, but of course we get interested
0:20:28 in Simone Weil and there were operas written about Simone Weil movies, whatever it might
0:20:29 be.
0:20:36 So the paradox is that in pushing yourself out of the way, like Simone Weil, like Marguerite
0:20:39 Porrette, these characters, you, you push yourself forward.
0:20:44 So we become unduly obsessed with the, the character of the mystic.
0:20:49 And that is also a way of, it can draw people in, but it’s also a way of missing the point.
0:20:57 You know, that, you know, we, we, you know, it’s an in relationship to stuff that I do.
0:21:05 It’s the reason I, you know, nothing, there’s nothing interesting going on in, in my head.
0:21:14 But if I can attend and, and engage in a disciplined way in reading and making notes and thinking
0:21:21 through difficult series of texts, I can, I can find something which is not me, right,
0:21:30 but which is, which is out there and find something perhaps in a text that shifts the, the aspect
0:21:32 under which that thing is seen.
0:21:40 And that’s, so in a sense, you know, writing is about writing is de-creation, writing is
0:21:42 pushing yourself out of the way.
0:21:48 And we have this, again, ridiculous idea that, you know, writing is some kind of expression
0:21:54 of the self, that there’s a self kind of preexisting in there.
0:22:00 And the self just has to write it down, you know, in the form of a memoir, you know, written
0:22:06 by 28 year olds who’ve experienced, maybe they experienced some extreme stuff, but they
0:22:08 usually haven’t.
0:22:10 And for Simone Vey, it’s, it’s the opposite.
0:22:15 It’s about, you know, getting as far away from that as possible in order to attend to
0:22:18 something that’s outside yourself.
0:22:27 What was really hitting home for me reading the book is that all of these mystics, and
0:22:39 this definitely includes Simone Vey, it really points to the ultimate, how to put this, it
0:22:47 really points to the ultimate emptiness of a cynical, endlessly questioning intelligence,
0:22:51 which in the end just draws you deeper and deeper into yourself.
0:22:53 And that’s a road to nowhere.
0:22:59 It’s certainly not a road to fulfillment, and, you know, I guess to be personal, I mean,
0:23:05 I have a mind that’s naturally cynical and questioning, and maybe that would be worth
0:23:10 the price of admission if I was some kind of philosophical genius with an enduring contribution
0:23:15 to make, but instead I’m probably just smart enough to think myself out of happiness.
0:23:20 So, so that sucks, I don’t know about you.
0:23:23 It sounds similar.
0:23:24 But I’m trying.
0:23:25 I’m trying.
0:23:29 I’m no Simone Vey, but I mean, who is?
0:23:33 The ultimate emptiness of a cynical questioning intelligence, yes.
0:23:41 And I think that’s often what gets paraded or presented to us and applauded as, you know,
0:23:48 being smart, and that seems to be the, you know, the, the most important, you know, criterion
0:23:55 we can use to decide whether someone should be, should get a job or not get a job or be
0:23:59 admitted into some institution or not, whether they’re smart.
0:24:05 There isn’t an emptiness to it, there’s a, there’s a howling void at the core of it.
0:24:12 And it, you know, it does require, I think, work, interesting work, requires a kind of
0:24:19 idiocy, a kind of stupidity, which I think is important that the, I mean, the book, you
0:24:26 know, one of the things that it does at the end is to pick up this idea from Brian Eno
0:24:29 of Idiot Glee.
0:24:38 And so, I’m serious about that, Idiot Glee is a kind of sheer joy at the, the mad fact
0:24:39 of the world.
0:24:42 And for people who don’t, Brian Eno of the very famous musician.
0:24:48 Yeah, Brian Eno was the inventor of various new categories of music, including ambient
0:24:58 and generative music and, and all rounds total, total genius, but the, and it’s the idea
0:25:04 there is that we have to, you know, can we just, can we just be kind of happy idiots
0:25:09 in a way and, and not have to be imprisoned in our smartness?
0:25:12 This takes us back to, to Hamlet, Hamlet is smart.
0:25:17 Hamlet is the ultimate expression of a cynical questioning intelligence.
0:25:23 And it’s, it’s, it’s fun to watch, you know, it’s, it’s extraordinary to watch it’s, it’s,
0:25:27 it’s held to be and held to be around.
0:25:33 And, and the idea that we should valorize that above other forms of being human seems
0:25:36 to me extremely, extremely strange.
0:25:43 So yeah, one or two cheers, or maybe three cheers for idiot Glee.
0:25:50 And, and you’re looking, I think I see that in, in, in, in the philosophy world, such
0:25:55 as it is, there’s a tremendous value placed on smartness.
0:26:00 And it’s impressive when someone’s really, really clever.
0:26:05 Is that going to lead to work, to actually interesting work, occasionally, but usually
0:26:14 not for work, you need a kind of plodding, plodding methodical discipline that you’re
0:26:20 going to carry on for a number of years, and then maybe you’ll be able to write a book.
0:26:23 So in a sense, I question the value of smartness.
0:26:26 We tend to conflate intelligence and wisdom, don’t we?
0:26:27 We do.
0:26:28 Yeah.
0:26:30 And wisdom is a different thing entirely.
0:26:36 And we confuse, we do confuse intelligence with wisdom, and, and then we, we confuse
0:26:40 artificial intelligence with wisdom, even more so.
0:26:58 And that’s, that’s, that’s even worse.
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0:30:59 I did want to ask if you think much about the relationship between psychedelics and
0:31:00 mystical experiences.
0:31:07 I mean, I don’t want to say flippantly that there’s a shortcut to a mystical experience,
0:31:10 but if there is a shortcut, it’s a giant bag of mushrooms.
0:31:11 Right.
0:31:15 Do you think much about this?
0:31:24 I think that I’m really bad with hallucinogenics.
0:31:34 I was a dirty old punk in England in the 1970s and our whole culture was based on a refusal
0:31:43 of hallucination and LSD taken by those dozy, lazy hippies that chased us down the street
0:31:46 for wearing straight trousers and things like that.
0:31:49 So I’ve got deep memories of that.
0:31:57 And if there was a drug that really got me going and drug of the subculture that I was
0:32:05 part of, it was amphetamines and amphetamines are also terrible, but it can be great to
0:32:07 listen to music on.
0:32:11 I think that there’s … I mean, there are people that I trust that is a friend of mine
0:32:16 called Justin Smith who wrote a piece for … I think for Wired called “This is a Philosopher
0:32:17 on Drugs.”
0:32:18 He was on the show.
0:32:19 We talked about that.
0:32:20 Okay.
0:32:26 And Justin is a proper philosopher and I found that piece very interesting and I don’t dismiss
0:32:29 it at all.
0:32:37 I think the kind of relaxation that he experienced in relationship to microdosing is very interesting
0:32:40 and I totally get that.
0:32:49 I think the mystics that we have that I talk about were disinhibited and it would be good
0:32:51 for us to be disinhibited too.
0:32:53 Did drugs play a role in that?
0:32:54 Could they?
0:32:55 Yes.
0:33:03 Personally, I’m more of a … I’m still more of a gin martini kind of person really.
0:33:09 I’m looking forward to tomorrow night and I’m going to go for drinks with a couple of
0:33:14 friends and my wife and we’re going to drink excellent martinis and I find that kind of
0:33:22 relaxation into a space with others, with the medium of alcohol in that case.
0:33:23 Yeah.
0:33:24 What is it?
0:33:25 What is it in James C?
0:33:30 Alcohol is the ultimate exciter of the yes function in man, a bit like that.
0:33:32 I’ll take that for the time being.
0:33:38 But I think it … Justin also says that he stopped drinking so maybe he’s right.
0:33:43 I don’t know if it’s the right way to put this but do you think cheating may be the
0:33:50 wrong word but do you think it may diminish the meaning and the quality of the mystical
0:33:55 experience if it is fueled or accelerated or sparked by drugs?
0:33:56 Yeah.
0:33:57 Yeah.
0:33:58 I think it doesn’t need it.
0:33:59 It can be there.
0:34:00 Yeah.
0:34:02 One thing that I was interested in, I still am.
0:34:07 I might write something about this, is the mysteries of elapsis, the mysteries of elapsina
0:34:11 that were carried on for about a thousand years outside the city of Athens.
0:34:18 These were people that were on a kind of collective eight-day series of processions, devotional
0:34:25 activities which culminated in a procession along the sacred way as it was called from
0:34:35 the center of Athens to the ritual site in elapsina, elapsis, and they fasted for a good
0:34:37 long period of time.
0:34:38 They got to the place.
0:34:44 There was dancing and then they drank a drink called cuchillon and there’s been much speculation
0:34:51 about what was in this drink, were there psychoactive substances in this, were these people tripping
0:34:54 when they were in the mysteries.
0:35:01 The woman that used to run the site, if she’s still there, insisted to me, this was just
0:35:03 barley and water.
0:35:08 Barley and water and these people were hungry and they wanted a good time.
0:35:09 There was no–
0:35:10 Nah.
0:35:11 They’re not buying it.
0:35:19 So, I think in that context and also collectively, you’re part of a group, in that case it would
0:35:25 have been several thousand people that would have experienced that together in an extreme
0:35:30 state then, yeah, I can understand that.
0:35:35 The ceremonial aspect of that and the intentionality behind it makes a big difference.
0:35:47 There’s a huge, huge difference between dropping acid and going to a creed show and engaging
0:35:51 with psychedelics in a ceremonial setting in that way.
0:35:53 Those are just fundamentally different enterprises.
0:35:54 Yeah.
0:36:00 And the ceremonial is very important to the mystical traditions that I deal with.
0:36:01 It really is.
0:36:02 This is not something you can just–
0:36:03 Yeah.
0:36:11 There’s a lot wrapped up in a lot of– and it helps if you have a ceremonial framework.
0:36:17 The other experiences I’ve had, which I don’t write about in the book, which have been important
0:36:25 in not directly, but indirectly, was I spent a couple of days on Mount Athos, the Holy
0:36:35 Mountain in northern Greece and was there and there’s very little food and both times
0:36:44 was during Lent and basically what you’re doing is you’re in church for 12, 16 hours
0:36:52 a day and there is singing and you’re very hungry and you’re deprived of sleep and then
0:36:57 you get a couple of hours’ sleep and then the bell goes at 4 a.m. and you go back in
0:37:03 and the people are back at it and the whole thing is framed ceremonially.
0:37:07 People are putting on costumes, taking off costumes, candles are being lit, they’re
0:37:16 being extinguished, they’re being moved around and after a few days of that, you begin to
0:37:25 understand, well, maybe this is what was going on in those Neolithic caves when oil flames
0:37:30 were being used to light up pictures of bison and horses or whatever.
0:37:36 If you can get into that ceremonial state of mind, devotional state of mind, then something
0:37:37 can open up.
0:37:47 You say that mysticism mostly lives on in the modern world as an aesthetic experience.
0:37:49 What does that mean?
0:37:55 So if you’d like to put it into shorthand, it would be that the mystic becomes the romantic
0:38:05 poet so that the mystical vision becomes what we expect awards with or I’m sitting here
0:38:11 in the Vox studio is very close to New York Harbour and I think about the beginning of
0:38:17 Melville’s Moby Dick where we get this amazing kind of reverse camera perspective of New
0:38:26 York Harbour seen somehow from the air at Battery Park and Corley’s Hook and the Melville,
0:38:31 the Emerson, the Whitman gives us the view of the whole.
0:38:32 The mystic becomes the poet.
0:38:34 Does that sense?
0:38:40 And that’s both good news in the sense in which the kind of experience that we associate
0:38:47 with mysticism does survive in things like poetry and music but it loses all of its institutional
0:38:48 framing.
0:38:52 It loses its church.
0:38:59 It just becomes some guy writing poems in a room.
0:39:09 But I think that for me the aesthetic experience that most captures mysticism for me is the
0:39:18 experience of music and also a lot of things that we were talking about, you know, a quietening
0:39:27 of the mind, a sense of leaving oneself behind, of giving up that cynical questioning intelligence,
0:39:32 all of those things for me can be had very directly in the experience of listening to
0:39:33 the music that I love.
0:39:34 Well, what’s going on there?
0:39:37 I mean, it may be my favourite line in the book where you say it’s impossible to be
0:39:41 an atheist while listening to the music that you love.
0:39:42 Yes.
0:39:46 I’m not exactly sure what you mean but also I know exactly what you mean.
0:39:47 Right.
0:39:51 And anyone who loves music will know what you mean too.
0:39:52 Yeah.
0:39:53 That’s it.
0:39:54 I mean, you know exactly what I mean.
0:39:56 And I’m not being prescriptive.
0:40:02 So at that point just insert, you know, whatever it is that floats your boat, insert at that
0:40:03 point.
0:40:04 But what’s going on there?
0:40:16 I think it’s an incredible opening of the mind.
0:40:23 And it’s hard to describe.
0:40:30 For me, you know, the world opened up through music, through pop music.
0:40:39 And it gave me a vocabulary, it gave me a way of not being me but of looking at something
0:40:43 else and just these experiences that I had around music.
0:40:51 So I try to talk about some of those in relationship to early seventies, Kraut Rock and some punk
0:40:58 stuff and odds and ends and end up with Nick Cave and people like that.
0:41:03 And there is an experience of the sacral in music.
0:41:06 There just is.
0:41:07 And you can.
0:41:15 And it’s why we, I think we judge, we judge people with bad musical tastes so harshly.
0:41:17 It’s why it’s really unforgivable, you know.
0:41:18 Okay.
0:41:19 So you voted for Trump.
0:41:20 Okay.
0:41:21 Fair enough.
0:41:22 I’ll try and understand you.
0:41:27 But you like this album, that’s unforgivable.
0:41:29 You just got terrible taste.
0:41:38 You know, we do and if someone doesn’t appreciate something that I really love musically, then
0:41:39 I judge them.
0:41:41 I think, you know, okay, you don’t get that.
0:41:45 Well, good luck with the rest of your life.
0:41:47 So, but how does it do it?
0:41:48 How does music do that?
0:41:54 Well, you could say it, you know, Schopenhauer thought it was the, it kind of resonated
0:41:58 with the will, the kind of the unconscious will, there was a kind of an attunement between
0:42:01 us and the world through music.
0:42:08 Nietzsche had similar sorts of ideas that music is the, is the highest art form because
0:42:13 it’s the, you know, it sort of resonates with the deepest level of us.
0:42:14 I think something like that is true.
0:42:16 I’m not, I’m not a problem.
0:42:18 It’s, it’s primordial.
0:42:19 It’s before language.
0:42:26 It’s, you know, again, it’s like, hey, man, if you’ve been to a tool show and you were
0:42:31 in the crowd when, you know, he goes on one of those 10 minute drum solos and that the
0:42:38 whole place is out of its body, sort of melding together in this weird Turkimian collective
0:42:43 evervescence or whatever, or Dionysian ecstasy or whatever it is.
0:42:50 I mean, everyone has been in a room like that and you’re just, you almost disassociate.
0:42:55 And even if you’ve never been to a church proper, if you’ve ever been in a show like
0:42:56 that, you’ve been to church.
0:42:57 It’s church.
0:42:58 Yeah.
0:42:59 It’s church.
0:43:00 Yeah.
0:43:01 Yeah.
0:43:06 One thing I learned very early in the, the United States was that my PhD advisor wound
0:43:08 up in Memphis.
0:43:12 And so the first time, the first place I went to in the United States was, was Memphis.
0:43:19 And the first thing I did when I got to Memphis was I went to church because my advisor Robert
0:43:25 had, when I knew him, this was, I didn’t see, didn’t see each other for like three years
0:43:29 because he couldn’t leave and I wasn’t going, anyway, so long story.
0:43:35 He’d shifted from being a Catholic to joining a black Baptist congregation in Memphis.
0:43:43 So I went to church with him and I remember that it was a band on stage.
0:43:51 There was a very long sermon and then things erupted and church was wild and unhinged.
0:43:58 And then I went to some clubs in Memphis with Robert, both the, the more touristy things
0:44:02 on Beale Street, but then there were places at that point in Midtown, which were much
0:44:04 more well behaved.
0:44:09 People were being very shown great decorum in clubs, but in church, it was something
0:44:10 else.
0:44:13 Then I learned that, you know, church is something that you can have.
0:44:14 Yeah.
0:44:16 Did we have church today or not?
0:44:20 So church isn’t, church doesn’t require a physical location of an actual church.
0:44:26 It can be something you have and I think you can have it in relationship to music.
0:44:28 And I wish I just did more of that.
0:44:31 I wish I listened to more live music.
0:44:38 I tend to be, I tend to do a lot of this, you know, at home with my wife and we listen
0:44:45 all with friends, but, and I listen a lot and it means so much to me, but I’ve always,
0:44:52 I’ve always preferred, I mean, what you say about the, the Durkheimian, you know, religious
0:44:56 experience of, of a collective, uh, there is that and that’s very important.
0:45:01 But for me, there is a almost, um, there’s an intimacy to musical experience, which
0:45:03 is also very important.
0:45:08 Listening to it alone, listening to it with one person and then, um, and just sort of
0:45:28 releasing yourself into it.
0:45:29 Hey there.
0:45:35 I’m Ashley C. Ford and I host “Into the Mix,” a Ben and Jerry’s podcast about joy and
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0:49:30 Just more practically, other than listening to music, just in the day-to-day crucible
0:49:32 of everyday life.
0:49:42 What other access points are there to this continuum of experience, to the mystical experience?
0:49:50 We did a class about a few years ago, five years ago now, called Human Observation.
0:49:51 Human Observation.
0:49:53 And the aim of the class was very simple.
0:50:01 We got students to work in groups of two, three, and to find a phenomenon and to observe
0:50:06 it methodically over a period of time.
0:50:07 And that’s what they did.
0:50:14 And then to write a report that could be read by somebody’s grandmother in very simple
0:50:17 language describing what they’d found.
0:50:23 So I think observation is a way of attending, actually just basic observation and doing
0:50:31 that with understanding and with empathy and not with contempt and judgment.
0:50:37 And that could be watching people move in the street or it could be watching what happens
0:50:45 when people have a drink or have coffee or it could be one of the groups was concerned
0:50:49 with the issue of what happens to corpses in New York.
0:50:55 And that was the first time I became aware of Heart Island, which has come into the
0:50:59 news in the last few years where it’s called the Potter’s Field of New York.
0:51:03 It’s where the unclaimed corpses go.
0:51:07 So observation I think is really, really important and it’s very hard to do.
0:51:09 I find that very hard to do.
0:51:10 Yeah.
0:51:16 Or look, it could be what people like to call the flow state.
0:51:19 Maybe it’s rock climbing or surfing or something.
0:51:24 Anything that collapses, that mind-body distinction can get you out of your head and just drops
0:51:29 you into your body where you were just immediately present.
0:51:35 Nothing else exists in the world except what is right in front of you.
0:51:40 That kind of state seems to be something like mysticism or mystical.
0:51:41 Yeah.
0:51:42 I agree, Sean.
0:51:46 The other thing I’d mentioned just come to my mind is that for me, I mean, I’m all my
0:51:51 family are from Liverpool, I’m a supporter of Liverpool Football Club and that’s my
0:51:54 primary religious identification.
0:52:01 And when I’m watching games, which is very rarely live these days, but it’s on TV or
0:52:08 at least with friends here in New York, that is now a body experience.
0:52:14 That sense of being, submitting to the flow of the game, submitting to the meditative
0:52:20 flow of the game and allowing your emotions to go where they want to go, that’s kind
0:52:22 of strange and beautiful.
0:52:27 So sports have a claim as well, at least for someone like me.
0:52:28 Yeah.
0:52:35 Or watching a concert pianist or a guitarist just leave their bodies, it feels like, and
0:52:39 just go into an almost, where they become like almost like a conduit, where whatever
0:52:42 it is they’re channeling, it’s just kind of flowing through them.
0:52:43 They’re not thinking at all.
0:52:44 They’re just doing.
0:52:48 Do you feel like that doing this?
0:52:50 These kind of conversations or the show?
0:52:51 Yeah.
0:52:52 No.
0:53:01 I mean, I mean, there are conversations like this one that I connect with more personally
0:53:10 and really enjoy, but I don’t, and I do is I try as hard as I can to really listen, but
0:53:12 there’s too much other shit going on.
0:53:15 You know, I still, there’s still, there’s still a voice in my head.
0:53:17 I’m still thinking about what you’re saying.
0:53:22 I’m thinking about what do I want to ask next or can I get to all the things I really
0:53:26 wanted to get to and what’s going to go and what can I keep, you know, that kind of stuff
0:53:33 is still going on and that does get in the way of being fully immersed.
0:53:37 But some conversations are closer to that than others.
0:53:42 I don’t know that I can say it’s ever fully quite like that.
0:53:49 When I’m speaking in occasions like this or, you know, doing an event, I have no recollection
0:53:57 of what I say in a sense it’s strangely disinhibiting.
0:54:04 So I think for me, talk is a way of, it can be a flow state too if you let it happen.
0:54:06 And that’s also hard to do.
0:54:12 It means lessing the self-censorship down a little bit, which is, which is quite tricky.
0:54:15 I think it’s easier to do in person too.
0:54:16 Oh yeah.
0:54:18 Yeah, it’s much easier to do in person.
0:54:20 And yeah, what did we talk about?
0:54:22 We talked about all sorts of things.
0:54:23 We talked about all the things.
0:54:25 We talked about all the things.
0:54:26 Are you right?
0:54:29 We have gone on for quite a bit here.
0:54:30 Let me just ask.
0:54:31 Yeah, sure.
0:54:37 When I’m reading your book, of course, if anyone listening is interested in engaging
0:54:44 with some of the primary texts, mystical texts, where would you recommend they start?
0:54:45 What books?
0:54:46 What thinkers?
0:54:47 What writers?
0:54:48 All right.
0:54:49 Very simple.
0:54:55 Get a hold of a copy of Bernard McGinn’s The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism,
0:55:01 published by the Modern Library in, let’s say, 2006, Essential Writings of Christian
0:55:02 Mysticism.
0:55:10 And that’s a brilliant book because McGinn is a proper University of Chicago theologian,
0:55:19 and he’s written this huge history of Christian mysticism in chronologically, but the essential
0:55:22 writings is it’s synchronic.
0:55:28 It’s a series of kind of samples, little excerpts from texts, so you’ll find Maestro
0:55:35 Eckhart along with Thomas Merton or Marguerite Perrette alongside Madame Guillaume, or wherever
0:55:36 it might be.
0:55:44 And it’s a wonderful book to use and peruse and to flick back and forth with.
0:55:52 And it gives you a sense of also how the mystical tradition circulated.
0:56:00 It wasn’t a tradition of the book and of the great book that had to be read from the beginning
0:56:01 to the end.
0:56:11 This was a tradition of fragments, of sermons, of reflections that were copied and recopied
0:56:12 and passed on.
0:56:20 So I think McGinn gives you a kind of flavor of how mysticism functions in a very powerful
0:56:21 way.
0:56:24 Well, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground.
0:56:28 And I’ll just reiterate what I said at the beginning.
0:56:35 Maybe what I love most about this book is how affirming and curious it is, which is too
0:56:38 rare in serious philosophy.
0:56:41 So I’m a fan.
0:56:42 Thank you very much, Sean.
0:56:44 I appreciate that very much.
0:56:48 Once again, the book is called Mysticism, Simon Critchley.
0:56:49 This was wonderful.
0:56:50 Thank you.
0:56:56 Thank you very much.
0:56:58 All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:57:02 You could probably hear my enthusiasm in this one.
0:57:07 I was drawn to this book from the beginning because I’m sincerely interested in what these
0:57:13 deep traditions of thought can offer us today, whether we’re religious or secular or something
0:57:17 in between.
0:57:22 I’ll be thinking about this conversation for a while and hopefully I’ll actually take
0:57:27 some of the advice on offer here and get out of my head a little bit more.
0:57:31 And maybe you will too, which would be awesome.
0:57:34 But as always, we do want to know what you think.
0:57:39 So drop us a line at TheGrayAreaAtBox.com and then please rate and review the pod and
0:57:41 subscribe if you haven’t already.
0:57:45 That helps us reach more people.
0:57:50 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Travis Larchuck, edited by Jorge Just,
0:57:55 engineered by Andrea Christen’s daughter, back checked by Anouk Dussot, and Alex Overington
0:57:57 wrote our theme music.
0:58:03 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
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0:01:28 The sheer feeling of aliveness.
0:01:33 We all know what that is, even though it comes in many different forms.
0:01:38 Maybe it’s going for a long run at night, or free climbing a mountain, or an intense
0:01:40 meditation practice.
0:01:46 Or that sensation you get when you’re on the floor by the stage at a great concert.
0:01:50 Call it a flow state, or religious experience, or whatever you want.
0:01:56 But it’s a kind of ecstasy almost all of us have experienced at some point in our lives.
0:02:01 People have been having experiences like this for centuries, and in previous eras they called
0:02:03 it a mystical experience.
0:02:09 In the modern world, a word like “mystical” feels weird, or out of place.
0:02:13 Maybe when you hear it, you think of a fringe religious figure.
0:02:16 Or some kind of spiritual guru.
0:02:21 Or if you’re less charitable, maybe you think of one of those crystal peddling influencers
0:02:23 on Instagram.
0:02:29 But the study of mysticism, this feeling of intense experience that I’m talking about,
0:02:33 has been the focus of philosophers and theologians for a very long time.
0:02:39 So what can we learn from the tradition of mystical thought?
0:02:46 May it help us live better and more meaningful and more present lives in the 21st century.
0:02:55 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Great Area.
0:02:57 Today’s guest is Simon Critchley.
0:03:01 He’s a writer and a philosopher at the New School in New York, and the author of a new
0:03:04 book called Mysticism.
0:03:10 Critchley is not a religious person, but he’s interested in mystical experiences, and what
0:03:15 I appreciate about his work is that it’s not judgmental.
0:03:21 It is open-minded and curious and exploratory in a way that is frankly all too rare in the
0:03:25 world of philosophy, which is what makes this book so enjoyable.
0:03:31 For Critchley, mysticism isn’t the question of religious belief, nor is it about ideas
0:03:32 and arguments.
0:03:37 It’s about how we use our attention and how we break free of habits and default modes
0:03:42 of being in the world that make it hard for us to get outside of ourselves.
0:03:45 And that really is what this conversation is about.
0:03:50 What can we do to get out of our head so that we can see and feel things that we otherwise
0:04:01 can’t see and feel?
0:04:03 I’m Simon Critchley.
0:04:04 Welcome to the show.
0:04:06 Sean, thank you very much for having me.
0:04:07 I’m very happy to be here.
0:04:13 Well, let’s get into mysticism, and I don’t want to ask you to just define mysticism because
0:04:17 it’s not that simple, but let’s wrap our arms around it a little bit.
0:04:22 You discuss a lot of different ways people have understood mysticism in the book.
0:04:24 How do you describe it?
0:04:30 What are some of the more useful ways to think about it?
0:04:34 There’s a lovely short definition by Evelyn Underhill that I begin the book with, which
0:04:36 is experience in its most intense form.
0:04:44 So pushing yourself aside in order to be open to a lived intensity of experience, an experience
0:04:47 of ecstasy, that’s the core of it for me.
0:04:52 The other thing about mysticism is that mysticism, so mysticism is not a religion, it’s a tendency
0:04:59 within religion, everything that we can call religion, which means that for as long as there
0:05:05 have been human beings, there is something like religion and at the core of that is something
0:05:07 like mystical practice.
0:05:13 It attracts an audience, so there’s something essentially popular and even populist about
0:05:14 mysticism.
0:05:22 I think in part because of its roots in religion, a lot of people today, especially secular
0:05:33 rationalist types, will dismiss mysticism as the realm of delusion and irrationality.
0:05:36 You clearly think that is a mistake, why?
0:05:37 And I agree by the way.
0:05:38 Yeah.
0:05:42 I mean, the word mystic has become a term of abuse, right?
0:05:49 So if you’re giving a talk in an academic context or not necessarily an academic context
0:05:54 and someone says that’s mysticism, then that’s a refutation, right there, that’s the end
0:05:55 of the conversation.
0:05:57 That’s mysticism, you’re a mystic.
0:06:09 And so mysticism has become a term of abuse and that connects to a much longer, deeper
0:06:16 story about the nature of philosophy in the modern world.
0:06:26 And I think the philosophers, I mean, the key figure here is Emmanuel Kant, who kind
0:06:33 of sets up modern philosophy, really, he’s the first philosopher who’s also an academic
0:06:39 before that philosophers have been courtiers or doctors and things like that.
0:06:52 But Kant is engaged in this critical, rational activity to draw tight the realm of faith
0:06:59 in order to make science be reconciled with the experience of faith and freedom.
0:07:04 And what has to be kept out of the way very clearly for Kant are those people that he refers
0:07:11 to as spirit seers, enthusiast fanatics, yes his wonderful term in German, Schwermerei, kind
0:07:13 of enthusiasm, fanaticism.
0:07:19 So philosophy then becomes this critical, rational enterprise that’s set up in order
0:07:23 to protect people against the threat of mysticism.
0:07:29 And that’s very much how it’s continued in its academic and non-academic guises.
0:07:35 That does a number of things that reduces philosophy to a very rationalistic, critical
0:07:38 enterprise, it really narrows it down.
0:07:44 It makes most of the history of philosophy and the history of thought unrecognizable
0:07:53 because the divine has been baked into philosophy from the beginning in Plato’s dialogues, Plato’s
0:07:58 Fadros in Symposium, it’s all about divine visions and even Aristotle, the highest goal
0:08:00 of ethics is divine life.
0:08:07 So it makes the history of philosophy unrecognizable and it really narrows down philosophical practice
0:08:10 to this very kind of small area of activity.
0:08:16 Well, I like the way I’ve heard you put it before that the dominant strain of philosophy,
0:08:23 modern philosophy became obsessed with asking whether something is true and became disinterested
0:08:27 in the question, why is it meaningful?
0:08:32 Exactly, there’s a brilliant pair of essays by John Stuart Mill.
0:08:38 The first one is on Bentham, Jeremy Bentham, who was his teacher and the Benthamite tendency
0:08:42 reduces philosophy to the question, is it true?
0:08:48 Of anything that’s presented to you, any doctrine, is it true?
0:08:56 The other side is Coleridge and the Coleridgean question of anything according to John Stuart
0:09:01 Mill is what is the meaning of it, what is the meaning of it?
0:09:03 And these two questions are both important questions.
0:09:09 If we’re presented with a proposition, whatever it might be, then we can ask of it, is it
0:09:16 true or is this delusional, fine?
0:09:23 And we expect the area of, say, scientific activity to be governed by a concern for truth.
0:09:29 But if that’s all that there is, then it loses this whole dimension of meaning and that’s
0:09:34 often been sidelined or overlooked in philosophy in the last couple hundred years.
0:09:41 How much of the mystical experience is really about shutting down the thinking mind?
0:09:44 Oh, yeah, a lot of it is about shutting down the thinking mind.
0:09:50 Yeah, it’s about pushing yourself out of the way as much as possible.
0:10:03 I begin the book with Hamlet and I say that Hamlet is the anti-mystic par excellence and
0:10:09 Hamlet is entirely in his own head and it’s the most intelligent head you could imagine
0:10:10 being inside.
0:10:12 He knows everything.
0:10:18 He can see everything from 17 different angles and he can still acquire with the most extraordinary
0:10:25 elegance and eloquence and chatter on.
0:10:32 But what that does in his case is it kills the capacity for love and it kills the capacity
0:10:38 for love for his girlfriend, partner, Ophelia, for his mother and for the world.
0:10:42 The world is a sterile promontory for Hamlet.
0:10:49 So Hamlet is what it’s like at its very best to be inside your head.
0:10:52 So the question is then how do you push that aside?
0:11:00 How do you push that self that we think is us, that actually is blocking our view to
0:11:02 what we really should be seeing?
0:11:04 How do you push that away?
0:11:10 And the mystics are people that have tried to do that given as kind of itineraries of
0:11:18 ways of doing that, where we can kind of leave ourselves behind, de-create ourselves as Simone
0:11:26 Vape says in order to undo ourselves, in order to open ourselves to something else.
0:11:36 There’s a great line from Marguerite Porrethigan where she talks about, “I have to hack and
0:11:42 hue away at myself in order to make a space that’s large enough for love to enter in,
0:11:44 to hack and hue.”
0:11:48 There’s a lot of hacking and hueing in mysticism that the self is something that has to be
0:11:51 kind of torn apart, torn open.
0:11:56 And if you can do that, then you can make a space that’s large enough for love to enter
0:11:57 in.
0:12:04 You know, what I was thinking about reading your book was Dostoevsky’s notes from Underground.
0:12:05 Oh, yeah.
0:12:06 Yeah.
0:12:13 There’s that opening line where the protagonist says, “I swear to you that to think too much
0:12:17 is a disease, a real actual disease.”
0:12:23 And that whole book is like a case study in how someone can be completely undone by their
0:12:24 own thoughts.
0:12:28 It’s haunted me since I first read it probably 20 years ago.
0:12:34 And it’s a weird thing to say, and I’m pretty sure much smarter people than me have already
0:12:35 made this argument.
0:12:40 But I have really come to believe that being self-absorbed in that way, being trapped in
0:12:44 the self in your own mind, is what hell actually is.
0:12:45 Yes.
0:12:46 Yes.
0:12:47 Oh, absolutely.
0:12:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:12:49 Yeah.
0:12:50 That’s very good, Sean.
0:12:58 Actually, you could say about the existence of hell, which we could talk about.
0:13:05 I don’t believe in the existence of a place called hell where most people are going to
0:13:06 go.
0:13:14 But I burn in hell insofar as I am a prisoner to myself, right, insofar as I’m locked in
0:13:22 this head, locked in these preoccupations, these doubts, this second guessing, the suspicion
0:13:29 that I have, I am burning in hell every day, so how do I push that away?
0:13:37 So is the idea here that when you can quiet your mind, when you can detach from the ego,
0:13:42 there’s a reality, there’s a part of the world or way of being in the world that becomes
0:13:46 available to you, that otherwise isn’t?
0:13:48 Yes, I think that is it.
0:13:50 Quieting the mind is a very good way of putting it.
0:13:59 It’s about, it’s quieting the mind and also trying to escape the curse of reflection.
0:14:06 The underground man is someone who is cursed with raciocination, he’s cursed with reflection.
0:14:17 And to quieten the mind means to let that go and to open yourself to find what one of
0:14:23 my favourite mystical writers, Meister Eckhart, calls a ‘releasement’, which is a ‘releasement’
0:14:30 from the self, a ‘releasement’ from the ego, to be out there with what is and to stand
0:14:37 there with what is and not to, not to be inside one’s head.
0:14:45 And that means looking, attending, attending largely, attending, having cultivated practices
0:14:46 of attention.
0:14:51 And these people you describe in the book, how do they get here?
0:14:52 What do they do?
0:14:57 Is it fasting, meditation, prayer, ritual?
0:15:00 What do they actually do to get there?
0:15:04 Everything really has to begin with reading.
0:15:11 And so the mystics were not just these people having these strange, extreme experiences.
0:15:18 They were people who, for whom all of this began with the reading of texts.
0:15:24 So in many ways, the easiest way of describing how to become a mystic is by reading, by allowing
0:15:33 your attention to be genuinely taken by something, a text that you’re engaged with, and to really
0:15:39 give yourself over to that, and not to necessarily always ask questions about whether it’s true,
0:15:44 whether it makes sense, but to try and enter into its world.
0:15:53 And that was something that was organised by the institutions of, in the case that I’m
0:15:57 dealing with in the book, the organisations of the Christian church, particularly the
0:15:58 monasteries.
0:16:08 So you could get to that state by the adoption of a series of bodily and spiritual practices
0:16:12 and then open yourself up.
0:16:13 But everything really begins with reading.
0:16:15 Yeah, so that would be it.
0:16:16 That’s what you have to do.
0:16:18 Well, done.
0:16:23 I’ll do that before dinner.
0:16:28 Let me ask you about another practice, which you’ve alluded to already, which is love.
0:16:31 And I used the word “practice” deliberately.
0:16:35 You write something very interesting in the book about love, and now I’ll quote you.
0:16:39 You say, “To love is to negate.
0:16:43 Love is a process of stripping away, cutting away, tearing away that opens us up to what
0:16:47 exceeds the self.”
0:16:50 How do you think about this relationship between mysticism and love?
0:16:57 Is the experience of true love, the act of true love itself, a kind of mystical practice?
0:16:58 Yes.
0:16:59 Yes.
0:17:00 In what way?
0:17:06 Well, it would be love, love of something which is not you, love of something which is
0:17:07 outside you.
0:17:16 So to give oneself over to someone, to something else completely, to another way of thinking
0:17:23 about it, is to give what you do not have and to receive that over which you have no
0:17:25 power.
0:17:29 To give what you do not have and to receive that over which you have no power.
0:17:32 So I cannot give love.
0:17:41 I can say I love you, but love has the strange quality of I have to pledge myself in love.
0:17:46 But for someone else to experience that love, or for me to get close to that love, it’s
0:17:51 not something that I have in my, a quantity of it in my mind, I have to give what I do
0:17:52 not have.
0:18:00 And then if I’m fortunate, I can receive love as a form of grace, which is something over
0:18:01 which I have no power.
0:18:07 I can be in love, I can receive love, I can get love back, but it’s not in my control.
0:18:15 So love, you know, really the practice of love turns on a relunciation of control.
0:18:16 That’s really key.
0:18:17 Yeah.
0:18:24 I, you know, you mentioned the French philosopher Simone Weil earlier.
0:18:30 We did an episode about her a couple of years ago and I think she’s one of the great moral
0:18:35 geniuses of the 20th century and she was also a Christian mystic and her ideas are all over
0:18:42 this book and her idea of decreation, which you mentioned earlier, I mean, that emptying
0:18:46 ourselves of ourselves or pushing ourselves out of the picture, I mean, she, for her that
0:18:54 was a really a precondition of loving another person or truly paying attention to another
0:18:57 person, which is really love in a way.
0:19:00 And that is, of course, easier said than done.
0:19:06 I’m not sure how many of us can really do it, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.
0:19:10 No, it doesn’t mean she’s right and it’s about and it’s about waiting for Simone Weil.
0:19:14 It’s about, you can cultivate this practice of love and then you just have to wait, perhaps
0:19:20 there’ll be grace, perhaps there, you can’t predict it, you can’t, you can’t force it.
0:19:27 You can, but you can undo the creature Lee or what I like to say, the critchley in the
0:19:33 sense that, you know, whatever this thing is, this, this lump of flesh that I am and its
0:19:42 preoccupations and its doubts and its stuff, that has to be stripped away and and and and
0:19:51 opened as much as possible in order to, yeah, in order to, in order to love and and then
0:19:53 to and then to wait.
0:20:01 And I think it’s the hardest thing to do is the hardest thing to ask of anybody.
0:20:07 And then the, and then the problem, then the paradox is not the parody, maybe it’s a paradox
0:20:13 is that the last person that Simone Weil was interested in was Simone Weil, she had no interest
0:20:23 in herself, you know, a totally selfless person, a hero, a heroine, but of course we get interested
0:20:28 in Simone Weil and there were operas written about Simone Weil movies, whatever it might
0:20:29 be.
0:20:36 So the paradox is that in pushing yourself out of the way, like Simone Weil, like Marguerite
0:20:39 Porrette, these characters, you, you push yourself forward.
0:20:44 So we become unduly obsessed with the, the character of the mystic.
0:20:49 And that is also a way of, it can draw people in, but it’s also a way of missing the point.
0:20:57 You know, that, you know, we, we, you know, it’s an in relationship to stuff that I do.
0:21:05 It’s the reason I, you know, nothing, there’s nothing interesting going on in, in my head.
0:21:14 But if I can attend and, and engage in a disciplined way in reading and making notes and thinking
0:21:21 through difficult series of texts, I can, I can find something which is not me, right,
0:21:30 but which is, which is out there and find something perhaps in a text that shifts the, the aspect
0:21:32 under which that thing is seen.
0:21:40 And that’s, so in a sense, you know, writing is about writing is de-creation, writing is
0:21:42 pushing yourself out of the way.
0:21:48 And we have this, again, ridiculous idea that, you know, writing is some kind of expression
0:21:54 of the self, that there’s a self kind of preexisting in there.
0:22:00 And the self just has to write it down, you know, in the form of a memoir, you know, written
0:22:06 by 28 year olds who’ve experienced, maybe they experienced some extreme stuff, but they
0:22:08 usually haven’t.
0:22:10 And for Simone Vey, it’s, it’s the opposite.
0:22:15 It’s about, you know, getting as far away from that as possible in order to attend to
0:22:18 something that’s outside yourself.
0:22:27 What was really hitting home for me reading the book is that all of these mystics, and
0:22:39 this definitely includes Simone Vey, it really points to the ultimate, how to put this, it
0:22:47 really points to the ultimate emptiness of a cynical, endlessly questioning intelligence,
0:22:51 which in the end just draws you deeper and deeper into yourself.
0:22:53 And that’s a road to nowhere.
0:22:59 It’s certainly not a road to fulfillment, and, you know, I guess to be personal, I mean,
0:23:05 I have a mind that’s naturally cynical and questioning, and maybe that would be worth
0:23:10 the price of admission if I was some kind of philosophical genius with an enduring contribution
0:23:15 to make, but instead I’m probably just smart enough to think myself out of happiness.
0:23:20 So, so that sucks, I don’t know about you.
0:23:23 It sounds similar.
0:23:24 But I’m trying.
0:23:25 I’m trying.
0:23:29 I’m no Simone Vey, but I mean, who is?
0:23:33 The ultimate emptiness of a cynical questioning intelligence, yes.
0:23:41 And I think that’s often what gets paraded or presented to us and applauded as, you know,
0:23:48 being smart, and that seems to be the, you know, the, the most important, you know, criterion
0:23:55 we can use to decide whether someone should be, should get a job or not get a job or be
0:23:59 admitted into some institution or not, whether they’re smart.
0:24:05 There isn’t an emptiness to it, there’s a, there’s a howling void at the core of it.
0:24:12 And it, you know, it does require, I think, work, interesting work, requires a kind of
0:24:19 idiocy, a kind of stupidity, which I think is important that the, I mean, the book, you
0:24:26 know, one of the things that it does at the end is to pick up this idea from Brian Eno
0:24:29 of Idiot Glee.
0:24:38 And so, I’m serious about that, Idiot Glee is a kind of sheer joy at the, the mad fact
0:24:39 of the world.
0:24:42 And for people who don’t, Brian Eno of the very famous musician.
0:24:48 Yeah, Brian Eno was the inventor of various new categories of music, including ambient
0:24:58 and generative music and, and all rounds total, total genius, but the, and it’s the idea
0:25:04 there is that we have to, you know, can we just, can we just be kind of happy idiots
0:25:09 in a way and, and not have to be imprisoned in our smartness?
0:25:12 This takes us back to, to Hamlet, Hamlet is smart.
0:25:17 Hamlet is the ultimate expression of a cynical questioning intelligence.
0:25:23 And it’s, it’s, it’s fun to watch, you know, it’s, it’s extraordinary to watch it’s, it’s,
0:25:27 it’s held to be and held to be around.
0:25:33 And, and the idea that we should valorize that above other forms of being human seems
0:25:36 to me extremely, extremely strange.
0:25:43 So yeah, one or two cheers, or maybe three cheers for idiot Glee.
0:25:50 And, and you’re looking, I think I see that in, in, in, in the philosophy world, such
0:25:55 as it is, there’s a tremendous value placed on smartness.
0:26:00 And it’s impressive when someone’s really, really clever.
0:26:05 Is that going to lead to work, to actually interesting work, occasionally, but usually
0:26:14 not for work, you need a kind of plodding, plodding methodical discipline that you’re
0:26:20 going to carry on for a number of years, and then maybe you’ll be able to write a book.
0:26:23 So in a sense, I question the value of smartness.
0:26:26 We tend to conflate intelligence and wisdom, don’t we?
0:26:27 We do.
0:26:28 Yeah.
0:26:30 And wisdom is a different thing entirely.
0:26:36 And we confuse, we do confuse intelligence with wisdom, and, and then we, we confuse
0:26:40 artificial intelligence with wisdom, even more so.
0:26:58 And that’s, that’s, that’s even worse.
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0:30:59 I did want to ask if you think much about the relationship between psychedelics and
0:31:00 mystical experiences.
0:31:07 I mean, I don’t want to say flippantly that there’s a shortcut to a mystical experience,
0:31:10 but if there is a shortcut, it’s a giant bag of mushrooms.
0:31:11 Right.
0:31:15 Do you think much about this?
0:31:24 I think that I’m really bad with hallucinogenics.
0:31:34 I was a dirty old punk in England in the 1970s and our whole culture was based on a refusal
0:31:43 of hallucination and LSD taken by those dozy, lazy hippies that chased us down the street
0:31:46 for wearing straight trousers and things like that.
0:31:49 So I’ve got deep memories of that.
0:31:57 And if there was a drug that really got me going and drug of the subculture that I was
0:32:05 part of, it was amphetamines and amphetamines are also terrible, but it can be great to
0:32:07 listen to music on.
0:32:11 I think that there’s … I mean, there are people that I trust that is a friend of mine
0:32:16 called Justin Smith who wrote a piece for … I think for Wired called “This is a Philosopher
0:32:17 on Drugs.”
0:32:18 He was on the show.
0:32:19 We talked about that.
0:32:20 Okay.
0:32:26 And Justin is a proper philosopher and I found that piece very interesting and I don’t dismiss
0:32:29 it at all.
0:32:37 I think the kind of relaxation that he experienced in relationship to microdosing is very interesting
0:32:40 and I totally get that.
0:32:49 I think the mystics that we have that I talk about were disinhibited and it would be good
0:32:51 for us to be disinhibited too.
0:32:53 Did drugs play a role in that?
0:32:54 Could they?
0:32:55 Yes.
0:33:03 Personally, I’m more of a … I’m still more of a gin martini kind of person really.
0:33:09 I’m looking forward to tomorrow night and I’m going to go for drinks with a couple of
0:33:14 friends and my wife and we’re going to drink excellent martinis and I find that kind of
0:33:22 relaxation into a space with others, with the medium of alcohol in that case.
0:33:23 Yeah.
0:33:24 What is it?
0:33:25 What is it in James C?
0:33:30 Alcohol is the ultimate exciter of the yes function in man, a bit like that.
0:33:32 I’ll take that for the time being.
0:33:38 But I think it … Justin also says that he stopped drinking so maybe he’s right.
0:33:43 I don’t know if it’s the right way to put this but do you think cheating may be the
0:33:50 wrong word but do you think it may diminish the meaning and the quality of the mystical
0:33:55 experience if it is fueled or accelerated or sparked by drugs?
0:33:56 Yeah.
0:33:57 Yeah.
0:33:58 I think it doesn’t need it.
0:33:59 It can be there.
0:34:00 Yeah.
0:34:02 One thing that I was interested in, I still am.
0:34:07 I might write something about this, is the mysteries of elapsis, the mysteries of elapsina
0:34:11 that were carried on for about a thousand years outside the city of Athens.
0:34:18 These were people that were on a kind of collective eight-day series of processions, devotional
0:34:25 activities which culminated in a procession along the sacred way as it was called from
0:34:35 the center of Athens to the ritual site in elapsina, elapsis, and they fasted for a good
0:34:37 long period of time.
0:34:38 They got to the place.
0:34:44 There was dancing and then they drank a drink called cuchillon and there’s been much speculation
0:34:51 about what was in this drink, were there psychoactive substances in this, were these people tripping
0:34:54 when they were in the mysteries.
0:35:01 The woman that used to run the site, if she’s still there, insisted to me, this was just
0:35:03 barley and water.
0:35:08 Barley and water and these people were hungry and they wanted a good time.
0:35:09 There was no–
0:35:10 Nah.
0:35:11 They’re not buying it.
0:35:19 So, I think in that context and also collectively, you’re part of a group, in that case it would
0:35:25 have been several thousand people that would have experienced that together in an extreme
0:35:30 state then, yeah, I can understand that.
0:35:35 The ceremonial aspect of that and the intentionality behind it makes a big difference.
0:35:47 There’s a huge, huge difference between dropping acid and going to a creed show and engaging
0:35:51 with psychedelics in a ceremonial setting in that way.
0:35:53 Those are just fundamentally different enterprises.
0:35:54 Yeah.
0:36:00 And the ceremonial is very important to the mystical traditions that I deal with.
0:36:01 It really is.
0:36:02 This is not something you can just–
0:36:03 Yeah.
0:36:11 There’s a lot wrapped up in a lot of– and it helps if you have a ceremonial framework.
0:36:17 The other experiences I’ve had, which I don’t write about in the book, which have been important
0:36:25 in not directly, but indirectly, was I spent a couple of days on Mount Athos, the Holy
0:36:35 Mountain in northern Greece and was there and there’s very little food and both times
0:36:44 was during Lent and basically what you’re doing is you’re in church for 12, 16 hours
0:36:52 a day and there is singing and you’re very hungry and you’re deprived of sleep and then
0:36:57 you get a couple of hours’ sleep and then the bell goes at 4 a.m. and you go back in
0:37:03 and the people are back at it and the whole thing is framed ceremonially.
0:37:07 People are putting on costumes, taking off costumes, candles are being lit, they’re
0:37:16 being extinguished, they’re being moved around and after a few days of that, you begin to
0:37:25 understand, well, maybe this is what was going on in those Neolithic caves when oil flames
0:37:30 were being used to light up pictures of bison and horses or whatever.
0:37:36 If you can get into that ceremonial state of mind, devotional state of mind, then something
0:37:37 can open up.
0:37:47 You say that mysticism mostly lives on in the modern world as an aesthetic experience.
0:37:49 What does that mean?
0:37:55 So if you’d like to put it into shorthand, it would be that the mystic becomes the romantic
0:38:05 poet so that the mystical vision becomes what we expect awards with or I’m sitting here
0:38:11 in the Vox studio is very close to New York Harbour and I think about the beginning of
0:38:17 Melville’s Moby Dick where we get this amazing kind of reverse camera perspective of New
0:38:26 York Harbour seen somehow from the air at Battery Park and Corley’s Hook and the Melville,
0:38:31 the Emerson, the Whitman gives us the view of the whole.
0:38:32 The mystic becomes the poet.
0:38:34 Does that sense?
0:38:40 And that’s both good news in the sense in which the kind of experience that we associate
0:38:47 with mysticism does survive in things like poetry and music but it loses all of its institutional
0:38:48 framing.
0:38:52 It loses its church.
0:38:59 It just becomes some guy writing poems in a room.
0:39:09 But I think that for me the aesthetic experience that most captures mysticism for me is the
0:39:18 experience of music and also a lot of things that we were talking about, you know, a quietening
0:39:27 of the mind, a sense of leaving oneself behind, of giving up that cynical questioning intelligence,
0:39:32 all of those things for me can be had very directly in the experience of listening to
0:39:33 the music that I love.
0:39:34 Well, what’s going on there?
0:39:37 I mean, it may be my favourite line in the book where you say it’s impossible to be
0:39:41 an atheist while listening to the music that you love.
0:39:42 Yes.
0:39:46 I’m not exactly sure what you mean but also I know exactly what you mean.
0:39:47 Right.
0:39:51 And anyone who loves music will know what you mean too.
0:39:52 Yeah.
0:39:53 That’s it.
0:39:54 I mean, you know exactly what I mean.
0:39:56 And I’m not being prescriptive.
0:40:02 So at that point just insert, you know, whatever it is that floats your boat, insert at that
0:40:03 point.
0:40:04 But what’s going on there?
0:40:16 I think it’s an incredible opening of the mind.
0:40:23 And it’s hard to describe.
0:40:30 For me, you know, the world opened up through music, through pop music.
0:40:39 And it gave me a vocabulary, it gave me a way of not being me but of looking at something
0:40:43 else and just these experiences that I had around music.
0:40:51 So I try to talk about some of those in relationship to early seventies, Kraut Rock and some punk
0:40:58 stuff and odds and ends and end up with Nick Cave and people like that.
0:41:03 And there is an experience of the sacral in music.
0:41:06 There just is.
0:41:07 And you can.
0:41:15 And it’s why we, I think we judge, we judge people with bad musical tastes so harshly.
0:41:17 It’s why it’s really unforgivable, you know.
0:41:18 Okay.
0:41:19 So you voted for Trump.
0:41:20 Okay.
0:41:21 Fair enough.
0:41:22 I’ll try and understand you.
0:41:27 But you like this album, that’s unforgivable.
0:41:29 You just got terrible taste.
0:41:38 You know, we do and if someone doesn’t appreciate something that I really love musically, then
0:41:39 I judge them.
0:41:41 I think, you know, okay, you don’t get that.
0:41:45 Well, good luck with the rest of your life.
0:41:47 So, but how does it do it?
0:41:48 How does music do that?
0:41:54 Well, you could say it, you know, Schopenhauer thought it was the, it kind of resonated
0:41:58 with the will, the kind of the unconscious will, there was a kind of an attunement between
0:42:01 us and the world through music.
0:42:08 Nietzsche had similar sorts of ideas that music is the, is the highest art form because
0:42:13 it’s the, you know, it sort of resonates with the deepest level of us.
0:42:14 I think something like that is true.
0:42:16 I’m not, I’m not a problem.
0:42:18 It’s, it’s primordial.
0:42:19 It’s before language.
0:42:26 It’s, you know, again, it’s like, hey, man, if you’ve been to a tool show and you were
0:42:31 in the crowd when, you know, he goes on one of those 10 minute drum solos and that the
0:42:38 whole place is out of its body, sort of melding together in this weird Turkimian collective
0:42:43 evervescence or whatever, or Dionysian ecstasy or whatever it is.
0:42:50 I mean, everyone has been in a room like that and you’re just, you almost disassociate.
0:42:55 And even if you’ve never been to a church proper, if you’ve ever been in a show like
0:42:56 that, you’ve been to church.
0:42:57 It’s church.
0:42:58 Yeah.
0:42:59 It’s church.
0:43:00 Yeah.
0:43:01 Yeah.
0:43:06 One thing I learned very early in the, the United States was that my PhD advisor wound
0:43:08 up in Memphis.
0:43:12 And so the first time, the first place I went to in the United States was, was Memphis.
0:43:19 And the first thing I did when I got to Memphis was I went to church because my advisor Robert
0:43:25 had, when I knew him, this was, I didn’t see, didn’t see each other for like three years
0:43:29 because he couldn’t leave and I wasn’t going, anyway, so long story.
0:43:35 He’d shifted from being a Catholic to joining a black Baptist congregation in Memphis.
0:43:43 So I went to church with him and I remember that it was a band on stage.
0:43:51 There was a very long sermon and then things erupted and church was wild and unhinged.
0:43:58 And then I went to some clubs in Memphis with Robert, both the, the more touristy things
0:44:02 on Beale Street, but then there were places at that point in Midtown, which were much
0:44:04 more well behaved.
0:44:09 People were being very shown great decorum in clubs, but in church, it was something
0:44:10 else.
0:44:13 Then I learned that, you know, church is something that you can have.
0:44:14 Yeah.
0:44:16 Did we have church today or not?
0:44:20 So church isn’t, church doesn’t require a physical location of an actual church.
0:44:26 It can be something you have and I think you can have it in relationship to music.
0:44:28 And I wish I just did more of that.
0:44:31 I wish I listened to more live music.
0:44:38 I tend to be, I tend to do a lot of this, you know, at home with my wife and we listen
0:44:45 all with friends, but, and I listen a lot and it means so much to me, but I’ve always,
0:44:52 I’ve always preferred, I mean, what you say about the, the Durkheimian, you know, religious
0:44:56 experience of, of a collective, uh, there is that and that’s very important.
0:45:01 But for me, there is a almost, um, there’s an intimacy to musical experience, which
0:45:03 is also very important.
0:45:08 Listening to it alone, listening to it with one person and then, um, and just sort of
0:45:28 releasing yourself into it.
0:45:29 Hey there.
0:45:35 I’m Ashley C. Ford and I host “Into the Mix,” a Ben and Jerry’s podcast about joy and
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0:49:30 Just more practically, other than listening to music, just in the day-to-day crucible
0:49:32 of everyday life.
0:49:42 What other access points are there to this continuum of experience, to the mystical experience?
0:49:50 We did a class about a few years ago, five years ago now, called Human Observation.
0:49:51 Human Observation.
0:49:53 And the aim of the class was very simple.
0:50:01 We got students to work in groups of two, three, and to find a phenomenon and to observe
0:50:06 it methodically over a period of time.
0:50:07 And that’s what they did.
0:50:14 And then to write a report that could be read by somebody’s grandmother in very simple
0:50:17 language describing what they’d found.
0:50:23 So I think observation is a way of attending, actually just basic observation and doing
0:50:31 that with understanding and with empathy and not with contempt and judgment.
0:50:37 And that could be watching people move in the street or it could be watching what happens
0:50:45 when people have a drink or have coffee or it could be one of the groups was concerned
0:50:49 with the issue of what happens to corpses in New York.
0:50:55 And that was the first time I became aware of Heart Island, which has come into the
0:50:59 news in the last few years where it’s called the Potter’s Field of New York.
0:51:03 It’s where the unclaimed corpses go.
0:51:07 So observation I think is really, really important and it’s very hard to do.
0:51:09 I find that very hard to do.
0:51:10 Yeah.
0:51:16 Or look, it could be what people like to call the flow state.
0:51:19 Maybe it’s rock climbing or surfing or something.
0:51:24 Anything that collapses, that mind-body distinction can get you out of your head and just drops
0:51:29 you into your body where you were just immediately present.
0:51:35 Nothing else exists in the world except what is right in front of you.
0:51:40 That kind of state seems to be something like mysticism or mystical.
0:51:41 Yeah.
0:51:42 I agree, Sean.
0:51:46 The other thing I’d mentioned just come to my mind is that for me, I mean, I’m all my
0:51:51 family are from Liverpool, I’m a supporter of Liverpool Football Club and that’s my
0:51:54 primary religious identification.
0:52:01 And when I’m watching games, which is very rarely live these days, but it’s on TV or
0:52:08 at least with friends here in New York, that is now a body experience.
0:52:14 That sense of being, submitting to the flow of the game, submitting to the meditative
0:52:20 flow of the game and allowing your emotions to go where they want to go, that’s kind
0:52:22 of strange and beautiful.
0:52:27 So sports have a claim as well, at least for someone like me.
0:52:28 Yeah.
0:52:35 Or watching a concert pianist or a guitarist just leave their bodies, it feels like, and
0:52:39 just go into an almost, where they become like almost like a conduit, where whatever
0:52:42 it is they’re channeling, it’s just kind of flowing through them.
0:52:43 They’re not thinking at all.
0:52:44 They’re just doing.
0:52:48 Do you feel like that doing this?
0:52:50 These kind of conversations or the show?
0:52:51 Yeah.
0:52:52 No.
0:53:01 I mean, I mean, there are conversations like this one that I connect with more personally
0:53:10 and really enjoy, but I don’t, and I do is I try as hard as I can to really listen, but
0:53:12 there’s too much other shit going on.
0:53:15 You know, I still, there’s still, there’s still a voice in my head.
0:53:17 I’m still thinking about what you’re saying.
0:53:22 I’m thinking about what do I want to ask next or can I get to all the things I really
0:53:26 wanted to get to and what’s going to go and what can I keep, you know, that kind of stuff
0:53:33 is still going on and that does get in the way of being fully immersed.
0:53:37 But some conversations are closer to that than others.
0:53:42 I don’t know that I can say it’s ever fully quite like that.
0:53:49 When I’m speaking in occasions like this or, you know, doing an event, I have no recollection
0:53:57 of what I say in a sense it’s strangely disinhibiting.
0:54:04 So I think for me, talk is a way of, it can be a flow state too if you let it happen.
0:54:06 And that’s also hard to do.
0:54:12 It means lessing the self-censorship down a little bit, which is, which is quite tricky.
0:54:15 I think it’s easier to do in person too.
0:54:16 Oh yeah.
0:54:18 Yeah, it’s much easier to do in person.
0:54:20 And yeah, what did we talk about?
0:54:22 We talked about all sorts of things.
0:54:23 We talked about all the things.
0:54:25 We talked about all the things.
0:54:26 Are you right?
0:54:29 We have gone on for quite a bit here.
0:54:30 Let me just ask.
0:54:31 Yeah, sure.
0:54:37 When I’m reading your book, of course, if anyone listening is interested in engaging
0:54:44 with some of the primary texts, mystical texts, where would you recommend they start?
0:54:45 What books?
0:54:46 What thinkers?
0:54:47 What writers?
0:54:48 All right.
0:54:49 Very simple.
0:54:55 Get a hold of a copy of Bernard McGinn’s The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism,
0:55:01 published by the Modern Library in, let’s say, 2006, Essential Writings of Christian
0:55:02 Mysticism.
0:55:10 And that’s a brilliant book because McGinn is a proper University of Chicago theologian,
0:55:19 and he’s written this huge history of Christian mysticism in chronologically, but the essential
0:55:22 writings is it’s synchronic.
0:55:28 It’s a series of kind of samples, little excerpts from texts, so you’ll find Maestro
0:55:35 Eckhart along with Thomas Merton or Marguerite Perrette alongside Madame Guillaume, or wherever
0:55:36 it might be.
0:55:44 And it’s a wonderful book to use and peruse and to flick back and forth with.
0:55:52 And it gives you a sense of also how the mystical tradition circulated.
0:56:00 It wasn’t a tradition of the book and of the great book that had to be read from the beginning
0:56:01 to the end.
0:56:11 This was a tradition of fragments, of sermons, of reflections that were copied and recopied
0:56:12 and passed on.
0:56:20 So I think McGinn gives you a kind of flavor of how mysticism functions in a very powerful
0:56:21 way.
0:56:24 Well, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground.
0:56:28 And I’ll just reiterate what I said at the beginning.
0:56:35 Maybe what I love most about this book is how affirming and curious it is, which is too
0:56:38 rare in serious philosophy.
0:56:41 So I’m a fan.
0:56:42 Thank you very much, Sean.
0:56:44 I appreciate that very much.
0:56:48 Once again, the book is called Mysticism, Simon Critchley.
0:56:49 This was wonderful.
0:56:50 Thank you.
0:56:56 Thank you very much.
0:56:58 All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:57:02 You could probably hear my enthusiasm in this one.
0:57:07 I was drawn to this book from the beginning because I’m sincerely interested in what these
0:57:13 deep traditions of thought can offer us today, whether we’re religious or secular or something
0:57:17 in between.
0:57:22 I’ll be thinking about this conversation for a while and hopefully I’ll actually take
0:57:27 some of the advice on offer here and get out of my head a little bit more.
0:57:31 And maybe you will too, which would be awesome.
0:57:34 But as always, we do want to know what you think.
0:57:39 So drop us a line at TheGrayAreaAtBox.com and then please rate and review the pod and
0:57:41 subscribe if you haven’t already.
0:57:45 That helps us reach more people.
0:57:50 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Travis Larchuck, edited by Jorge Just,
0:57:55 engineered by Andrea Christen’s daughter, back checked by Anouk Dussot, and Alex Overington
0:57:57 wrote our theme music.
0:58:03 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
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The sheer feeling of aliveness. We all know what that is, even though it comes in many different forms. Maybe it’s going for a long run at night. Or free-climbing a mountain. Or an intense meditation practice. Or that sensation you get when you’re on the floor at a great concert. Call it a flow state or a religious experience or whatever you want, but it’s a kind of ecstasy.
People have been experiencing this for centuries, and in previous eras, they called it a mystical experience. In the modern world a word like “mystical” feels weird or out of place. Maybe when you hear it, you think of a fringe religious figure. Or a spiritual teacher. Or crystal-peddling influencers on Instagram. But the study of mysticism — that feeling of intense experience — has been the focus of philosophers and theologians for centuries. So what can we learn from the tradition of mystical thought? Might it help us live better and more meaningful lives in the 21st century?
Today’s guest is Simon Critchley. He’s a writer and a philosopher at the New School in New York and the author of a new book called Mysticism. In this conversation, he tells host Sean Illing how we can all get outside our own heads and enjoy what it feels like to be alive.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Simon Critchley, philosopher and author of the book Mysticism
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