How to feel alive, explained by a philosopher.
Almost all of us know what a peak experience feels like. For some people, it’s climbing mountains or surfing; for others, it’s an intense meditation practice, or maybe it’s as simple as that sensation you get on the floor at a great concert.
Call it a flow state or transcendence or whatever you want, but it’s a kind of ecstasy most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. And it’s something people have written about and explored for centuries. Indeed, there’s a whole tradition of mystical thinking that tries to make sense of these experiences and offer blueprints for achieving them.
Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at the New School in Manhattan and the author of a fascinating new book called Mysticism. Although he isn’t a religious person in any conventional sense, Critchley is very interested in mystical experiences and the history of mystical literature. His work is open-minded and curious about this world in a way that is quite rare in professional philosophy.
I recently invited Critchley on The Gray Area to talk about why he thinks mysticism — or what someone he quotes in the book calls “experience in its most intense form” — isn’t about beliefs or ideas or rote rituals. Instead, he argues, it’s about how we use our attention and how we break free of habits and default modes of being in the world that make it hard for us to get outside of ourselves. And that, really, is what this conversation is about: What can we do to get out of our heads so that we can see and feel things that we otherwise can’t see and feel?
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean Illing
How do you describe mysticism?
I don’t want to ask you to just define mysticism because it’s not that simple. But let’s wrap our arms around it a little bit. You discuss a lot of different ways people have understood mysticism in the book. How do you describe it? What are some of the more useful ways to think about it?
Simon Critchley
There’s a lovely short definition by Evelyn Underhill that I begin the book with, which is “experience in its most intense form.” So pushing yourself aside in order to be open to a lived intensity of experience, an experience of ecstasy. That’s the core of it for me. The other thing is that mysticism is not a religion; it’s a tendency within religion, everything that we can call religion. Which means that for as long as there have been human beings, there is something like religion. And at the core of that is something like mystical practice.
Sean Illing
How much of the mystical experience is really about shutting down the thinking mind?
Simon Critchley
A lot of it is about shutting down the thinking mind. It’s about pushing yourself out of the way as much as possible. I mean, I begin the book with Hamlet. And I say that Hamlet is the anti-mystic par excellence. Hamlet is entirely in his own head, and it’s the most intelligent head you could imagine being inside. He knows everything. He can see everything from 17 different angles, and he can soliloquize with the most extraordinary elegance and eloquence. But what that does in his case is it kills the capacity for love. And it kills the capacity for love for his girlfriend and partner Ophelia, for his mother, and for the world. The world is a sterile promontory for Hamlet. So Hamlet is what it’s like to be inside your head.
