On Mysticism

The Experience of Ecstasy

De: Simon Critchley

Narrado por: Simon Critchley

Mysticism is about existential ecstasy—an experience of heightening one's senses and self into a sheer feeling of aliveness. Mystical experiences offer us a practical way to open our thoughts and deepen the sense of our lives, whether through a mainstream connection to God or by taking part in mind-altering experiences.

Here, Simon Critchley explores the history and practice of mysticism, from its origins in Eastern and Western religion, through its association with esoteric and occult knowledge, and up to the ecstatic modernism of T.S. Eliot and others. Through a discussion of the lives of famous mystics, like Julian of Norwich and Jesus Christ, Critchley reveals how embracing the spectrum of mystical experience can refresh our thinking and help us live deeper and freer lives.

Philosophical and playful, analytical and inventive, On Mysticism is a definitive account of humanity's quest to understand the divine, and a call to thinkers everywhere to broaden our minds to life larger than our selves.

©2024 Simon Critchley (P)2024 Profile Books Ltd

Great book!

I really appreciated listening this book. As an artist I identify as anarcho mystic, so the themes in this book resonate strongly. Old favorites, like st. Teresa, Meister Eckhart, William James and Eugene Tucker, but also new voices like Annie Dillard and really want to dive deeper in TS Elliot and Julian of Norwich. I love that author integrated music, especially punk :) into the discussion continuing tradition of Nietzsche s birth of tradegy and few other contemporary philosopher (love tuckers take on black metal). Easy and joyful listen.

Thank you Dr. Critchley

This is an amazing book. Western philosophy is predominantly hostile and condescending towards religion and mysticism. Critchley is a compassionate and astute observer of the power and value of mysticism for our fraught era. Thank you Dr. Critchley

Author is obviously a teacher of philosophy

The information was good, well presented and thoughtful. The author’s confessions surrounding his own conversion and hisbelief in the supremacy of music as a vehicle to the mystical were not a surprise. Imho the book would have been better if it were less a lecture than a conversation-but given hos job, understandable.

Utter Drivel

Absolutely no structure and teaching of fundamental principles. It just meanders with saturated language and strains to make a structure. Waste of money! I'm getting very disenchanted with Audible, they need to allow for refunds for such crap.

Interesting but has limits

Summary: An agnostic explores the history and philosophy of Christian mysticism to understand how mystical experience seems to be a part of being human.

This is an odd book. Simon Critchley is an agnostic philosopher writing primarily about Christian mysticism because he wants to explore the ways that mystical experience inform what it means to be human without really grappling with whether God is involved. I am going to start at the end because I think that helps to make sense of the project. Critchley moves to modern art, particularly punk music, as a type of mystical experience that he has felt, that transcends the traditional rational categories of philosophy and experience.

In some ways he is coming at the argument that Dallas Willard makes about the reality of a category of spiritual knowledge in reverse. Willard wants to suggest that divine revelation and experience are trustworthy types of knowledge and experience. I think in both Critchley and Willard's books, the rough point that the category exists has been made sufficiently to agree. But the next step is harder. Once you agree that there is a category, what do you do with it? Willard is mostly arguing against a type of hyper rationalism that I don't think carries much weight. And Critchley is arguing that the mystical experience of feeling one with "God" or the world or those around us, while also getting a sense of divine love and belonging that he associates with the mystical experience in part of the human experience and a good that draws us away from hyper individualism and maybe even depression and loneliness.

My on-going reading project on Christian discernment had little help from this book because my project is at least in part about the evaluation of that mystical experience or Willard's spiritual knowledge and I have just naturally assumed that they already exist when I am asking the question about how we evaluate them.

There was an interesting discussion of mystical experience that draws one into a relationship with the divine or infinite and the type of mystical experience that results in the annihilation of the self within the divine. Historically within the Christian tradition, both of these metaphors have been used, but I personally think the former is more aligned with the Christian tradition than the later. This can somewhat be connected to apophatic and cataphatic conceptions of our understanding of God and whether we can really use description to speak of either God or mystical experience or can we only talk about what is not. In this sense, these are philosophical questions, but at the same time, philosophy apart from theology has limits to what it can say.

Critchley is not overtly making a Christian argument and he is (by his own admission) using Christian terms and history because he and the Western philosophical tradition has been shaped by Christianity more than eastern philosophy and he has less connection to those traditions. But as a Christian, some of the discussion seems to just miss the point because he isn't going to that next step. There is no real discussion of eschatology here and I think that matters to the way he talks about mysticism. For instance when he discusses Julian of Norwich's negation of creation to affirm it, the tension that he was trying to draw is minimized by affirming creation, but holding it loosely because of the greater "realness" of the coming world.

One of the other reviewers on Goodreads talks about the way that CS Lewis uses Joy as a type of mystical reality, and I agree but I also think that Lewis' description of heaven in The Great Divorce as being more real is also a type of understanding of the way that mystical experience is a revealing in part of how the world and human experience will be "more" not just a negation of the creatureliness of the physical world.

Critchley does not ignore the modern world. He has good discussion of TS Elliot and Annie Dillard, but he speaks of them as writing about the mystical world and nature not experiencing it. The experience of the mystical that is an experience of a personal God and not just an experience of oneness with nature or beauty would require more than what Critchley can give because of his agnosticism, or at least his reluctance to fully embrace Christianity. For him, that mystical experience of God is not part of the modern discussion of mysticism.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/on-mysticism/