There is a danger in holding on too tightly to the rational senses that we close ourselves off to more subtle life experiences, experiences that cannot be measured or explained by reference to the material sciences. But equally there is a danger in letting go, of assigning mystical, magical properties to things that have more mundane explanations, we risk simply making fools of ourselves.
So, which is it to be? Holding on or letting go? There is a middle way of course, but it’s difficult to discern unaided. Training in the esoteric disciplines can help, as can self-styled teachers and writers of books, but it’s difficult to know who to trust, who among the gurus is truly wise, or simply on an ego-trip. Fortunately for the layman there are also spontaneous experiences of the mind – mystical experiences – which reveal the subtle, psychological, spiritual dimensions of reality, experiences that blur the boundary between what we think of as our selves and the reality we inhabit.
It’s also apparent from the observation of human behaviour, most of us are born preprogrammed to overlook this subtle aspect of our nature even though, paradoxically, the journey of our lives is richly seeded with opportunities for recognising it. What also hampers us is we cannot think our way to the mystical experience, even if we want to. The mind is so fogged up with thinking it misses the point. Mystical experiences are most commonly triggered in meditative states when thinking is subdued, or they can happen unexpectedly, for no apparent reason at all, but we cannot “think” our way into them. However we manage it, the Mystical experience is a sudden and inexplicable falling through into a state of mind that is impossible to imagine beforehand, or adequately describe afterwards, but one that is nevertheless impossible to ignore.
But having been presented with the subtle nature of reality, it raises more questions, chief among them being the nature of our place in that reality. The mystical experience is a visionary and expansive state and, once experienced, the rational mind must allow it, though it may at first try to explain it away as a mental aberration. Only when dissatisfied with the more mundane explanations will it finally come round to an acceptance of something missing in our understanding of nature. But here again the problem is we fall back on rational thinking for explanations of what that missing understanding might be.
The mystical state suggests the underlying nature of things is one of infinite possibility, that thinking along certain lines collapses our potential experience of reality to within the limits of what our thoughts allow. We grant a pattern of our own imagining to the universe, and our reality takes that form, but this is not to explain the totality of our potential experience, it is only to limit it to within bounds that are psychologically acceptable or permissible, given our inherent limitations.
At the ground level the mystical experience is therefore best reflected upon, and lived in spirit rather than too deeply probed, or pursued, or we risk simply losing ourselves in an infinite and ultimately unknowable void, or we restrict its potential to either a collective or a personal myth by weaving a descriptive story around it. The experience however, does grant us the sense of an intimate connection with all there is, even if we can no longer explain it or feel it with the clarity of the initial experience. And to live in the spirit of that experience raises our perspective of life, sets us on a journey that deflects the ego from its more destructive habits – chiefly the imposition of our own will over that of others.
When we see the universe as infinitely interconnected, we see the intimate relations between things, people, events, dreams. By contrast, living the purely rational life, the connections are severed and we see nothing. To live life blind to the connections is to risk being insensitive to those situations where our actions cut across the fate of others, whether we mean to or not – insensitive also to the idea that to act in certain ways, deliberately, at the expense of others, is to diminish both them and ourselves. Therefore the only wise course open to us in any situation is that which enriches the universe as a whole, or at the very least gains nothing for ourselves that comes at the expense of any thing or any one else.
Full moon and a Spring tide draws me to the coast. The coast for me is Southport, North West England, a place you rarely catch the sea – at least not splashing up against the promenade, even at high tide, so the opportunity is not to be missed. I have in mind an hour’s stroll along the front, and some sea air, but I am an hour late in arriving and the tide is already on its way out, a slow peeling back of muddy foreshore puncturing my boyish optimism.
The meaning of things isn’t to be found in studying them, said Carina, nor in thinking about them at all, but more in attaining a state of non-judgemental awareness. Then we see there is no meaning in things themselves, that in seeking their meaning we obscure the formless beauty in them, and through analysis, through over-thinking, we fail to experience love. 
The Rivendale Review 