How to achieve a mystical state

So if one experiences such a mystical state, what boon will they bring back?
 
The demonstration of a 'ground up' methodology, or the ability to map and model such states, does not actually invalidate their 'top down' occurrence.
 
From my studies of neurology and psychology, I would have to agree with Thomas. Yes the brain lights up as indicated by the use of FMRI. Mattieu Ricard, the Bhuddist monk has been working Dr. Richard Davidson for years. His brain lights up intensely during different types of meditation! So now we have a problem of understanding consciousness to begin with before one can really draw any conclusions. So far all we have are really interesting phenomena to study and wonder over.

I know this for sure. The mind can create. It creates thoughts, which can inspire feeling. The brain can be the center of biological depression, which can spawn negative thoughts, which carry their own psychological valence, so the cycle continues. In Buddhism, certain states, though experienced and enjoyed are not to be clung to. They are phenomena and should be regarded as a stepping stone, and nothing more. Ectsatic states come and go, but learning from them is something else. I always thought that the story of mana in the desert was symbolic of not clinging to what you understood yesterday, but rejoice in this, the day the lord hath made.
 
Nasruddin said:
In Buddhism, certain states, though experienced and enjoyed are not to be clung to. They are phenomena and should be regarded as a stepping stone, and nothing more.
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Same in the traditional Christian systems, with a couple of notable exceptions. The heysychast movement in the Orthodox Patriarchies is one, although the practice is deemed as irregular.

I tend to agree with Denys Turner, that authentic Christian mystical theology was never 'experiential', whereas many seem to think that the point of religion is to achieve 'a mystical experience'.

Mister Eckhart, for example, never had a mystical 'experience' as far as we know. Thomas Aquinas famously is supposed to have had such, but it can also be read as a profound certitude in his faith, rather than an actual 'event'. St Teresa and Francis of Assisi is a whole other ballgame ... he's supposed to have been seen levitating whilst at prayer ... Julian of Norwich had her 'shewings' ...
 
The protagonist in Somerset Maugham's The Razors Edge has an oceanic experience on a frozen mountainside wherein he sees all below him as essentially one. Many of us have had insights into the essence of reality in very ordinary sounding ways, yet they are as beautiful and profound as anything I know. Once, when I realized that I don't exist the way I thought I did, I fell back laughing at the absurdity of it all for the longest time. I laughed myself silly, alternating laughing and crying. Afterwards, I felt so light, like I had been relieved of some old weight I'd carried for far too long.
 
Nasruddin said:
I know this for sure. The mind can create. It creates thoughts, which can inspire feeling. The brain can be the center of biological depression, which can spawn negative thoughts, which carry their own psychological valence, so the cycle continues.
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We create our life experiences through our way of thinking.

damn double edged sword that is...
 
wil said:
We create our life experiences through our way of thinking.

damn double edged sword that is...
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The interesting thing is, few people stop to think about how and what they are thinking, believing that the very mode of thought they employ is the only one. "Metacognition", is thinking about thinking, and this kind of cultivated awareness reveals all kinds of interesting things about the way we think and how that thinking is being driven.
 
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That's why I pay so much regard to contemporary neuroscience's comments on 'modern thinking' and the apparent risks ... unproven but highlighted in a number of researches, along the lines that "... the overactivity of the left hemisphere, and concreteness, again a well used criterion – ironically an incapacity to understand metaphor. It would be interesting if further work could highlight this area in relation to cognitive work with psychosis" source

This from Ian McGilchrist:
If it should turn out that the development of the semantic and syntactic language centre in the left hemisphere is a key determinant of the way of seeing the world associated with that hemisphere as a whole ...
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That is, a commentary on the world that is weighted to the self-ordering of experience rather than the experience, of matter over metaphor, of myth over meaning, so that my experience of the experience is more important than the experience itself ... my reality is more important than reality as such — and this has been the vast output of contemporary 'spiritual' literature of the late 20th century, informed, superficially and with a western (consumer and ego-oriented) understanding of Eastern metaphysical systems. Thus the appeal of Zen in Buddhism, Sufism in Islam, Centering Prayer in Christianity, for example ...
... its translocation to the other hemisphere – or alternatively, the translocation into the left hemisphere of normally right-hemisphere functions – could have widely different, even opposing, effects in different cases. The point is this: does the coexistence in the same hemisphere, be it right or left, of language and what are normally right-hemisphere functions, lead to language being ‘reinterpreted’ according to the characteristic mode of a normal right hemisphere, or does it lead to the opposite effect – the other functions going on in that hemisphere being transformed by (what would be normally) a left- hemisphere way of seeing things? To put it simply, does placing a maths professor in a circus troupe result in a flying mathematician, or a bunch of trapeze artists who can no longer perform unless they have first calculated the precise trajectory of their 1 leap?
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This has a massive impact on the interpretation of religious experience — on the one hand the denial of religious experience on the grounds that it cannot be explained to the satisfaction of the individual in question, therefore it cannot be true (which discreetly assumes the individual in question is the arbiter of truth), and on the other that a 'reward' is required before any effort is made — and as so many 'spiritual' practices are being sold on the basis of attaining 'well-being', 'bliss' and the 'feel-good' factor generally, that this has become the raison d'être of the practice in the western consciousness.

For balance:
Probably both scenarios are realized in different individuals, leading to 2 unusual talents, and unusual deficits. This may be the link between cerebral lateralisation and creativity, and it may account for the otherwise difficult to explain fact of the relatively constant conservation, throughout the world, of genes which, at least partly through their effects on lateralisation, result in major mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis (now known as bipolar disorder), and developmental disorders, such as autism and Asperger’s syndrome. It may also be associated with homosexuality, which is thought to involve a higher than usual incidence of abnormal lateralisation. Such genes may, particularly in the case of mental illness, be highly detrimental to individuals, and have an impact on fertility for the population at large – and would therefore have been bred out long ago, if it were not for some hugely important benefit that they must convey. If they also, through their effects on lateralisation, in some cases led to extraordinary talents, and if particularly they did so in relatives, who have some but not all of the genes responsible, then such genes would naturally be preserved, on purely Darwinian principles.
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An aside here, but relevant:
A number of studies have come to the fore highlighting the risks of 'mindfulness meditation', and the finings are two-fold.

The first is that practiced outside a traditional holding pattern, there is an increased risk of mental instability, depression and potential psychosis, because the idea of 'nothingness' and other such cool-sounding aphorisms only actually have relevance within the system from which they have been plucked. There has been an increase in the numbers of people suffering delimitating side-effects of 'mindfulness' when practices as some kind of 'increase your creativity' or 'manage your work-stress situation' — in short where the technique is sold with some kind of work-life benefit.

The other is that the same 'calming' etc effect can be achieved by reading poetry, visiting an art gallery, looking at the sky ...

So really, the point of practicing a specific spiritual exercise exists only within the context of the spiritual system as a whole — the Tradition — no matter how appealingly t's plucked and packaged for general consumption. The fruits of mediation as championed by the likes of the Buddhist Mattieu Ricard for example, 'the happiest man in the world', can only be achieved by embracing the whole world view and living one's life accordingly — in his case as a Buddhist monk. If one believes one can utilise Mindfulness to become a Wall Street Wizard, one is setting out on a perilous course, on seas fraught with tides and reefs and you'd be better off listening to Beethoven's 6th.
 
Thomas said:
That's why I pay so much regard to contemporary neuroscience's comments on 'modern thinking' and the apparent risks ... unproven but highlighted in a number of researches, along the lines that "... the overactivity of the left hemisphere, and concreteness, again a well used criterion – ironically an incapacity to understand metaphor. It would be interesting if further work could highlight this area in relation to cognitive work with psychosis" source

This from Ian McGilchrist:

That is, a commentary on the world that is weighted to the self-ordering of experience rather than the experience, of matter over metaphor, of myth over meaning, so that my experience of the experience is more important than the experience itself ... my reality is more important than reality as such — and this has been the vast output of contemporary 'spiritual' literature of the late 20th century, informed, superficially and with a western (consumer and ego-oriented) understanding of Eastern metaphysical systems. Thus the appeal of Zen in Buddhism, Sufism in Islam, Centering Prayer in Christianity, for example ...

This has a massive impact on the interpretation of religious experience — on the one hand the denial of religious experience on the grounds that it cannot be explained to the satisfaction of the individual in question, therefore it cannot be true (which discreetly assumes the individual in question is the arbiter of truth), and on the other that a 'reward' is required before any effort is made — and as so many 'spiritual' practices are being sold on the basis of attaining 'well-being', 'bliss' and the 'feel-good' factor generally, that this has become the raison d'être of the practice in the western consciousness.

For balance:


An aside here, but relevant:
A number of studies have come to the fore highlighting the risks of 'mindfulness meditation', and the finings are two-fold.

The first is that practiced outside a traditional holding pattern, there is an increased risk of mental instability, depression and potential psychosis, because the idea of 'nothingness' and other such cool-sounding aphorisms only actually have relevance within the system from which they have been plucked. There has been an increase in the numbers of people suffering delimitating side-effects of 'mindfulness' when practices as some kind of 'increase your creativity' or 'manage your work-stress situation' — in short where the technique is sold with some kind of work-life benefit.

The other is that the same 'calming' etc effect can be achieved by reading poetry, visiting an art gallery, looking at the sky ...

So really, the point of practicing a specific spiritual exercise exists only within the context of the spiritual system as a whole — the Tradition — no matter how appealingly t's plucked and packaged for general consumption. The fruits of mediation as championed by the likes of the Buddhist Mattieu Ricard for example, 'the happiest man in the world', can only be achieved by embracing the whole world view and living one's life accordingly — in his case as a Buddhist monk. If one believes one can utilise Mindfulness to become a Wall Street Wizard, one is setting out on a perilous course, on seas fraught with tides and reefs and you'd be better off listening to Beethoven's 6th.
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Couldn't agree more. We have had this conversation before I think! One of my favorite books "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism" by Chogyam Trungpa talks about that very thing. There can be no up without a down, and mindfulness practice is the same way. The inner peace does come and the bliss and ecstasy can be experienced, but as you say they are not the point of the practice. Remember talking about Jack Engler, the psychologist who said: "You have to be somebody before you are nobody"? He argued that meditation practiced outside it's original system results in exactly the kinds of problems you've outlined. Joseph Campbell often taught that religion was supposed to prepare one to face the inner demons that arise in the mind of man, Religion was supposed to provide a stable, mature, insightful model into the realm of infantile wish and fear.

Since I practice Tibetan Buddhism, I follow the Mind and Life Institute where Ven Mattieu Ricard has given his time. The work of people like Dr. R. Davidson exploring the use and practice of mindfulness in our daily lives is invaluable. The crass commercial, trendy use of meditation to "get" something is a poor use of the practice, but if it is taught properly with the guidance of people like Jon Kabat-Zin, who has had great success with the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program. People who had been suffering with chronic pain were referred to Jon by their doctors. Over the last 20 years this program has enjoyed great success, and many graduates still practice privately.

On a personal note. I suffer from Bipolar disorder, ADHD, and something called "Complex" PTSD. These mental disorders have been with me all my life, though they came to a head a few years ago resulting in a personal crisis from which I may not have emerged. I had suicidal ideation on a daily basis. I lived with anxiety, depression, mania, violent rage, and fear. Medications they gave me either made me crazy manic, or physically ill. I have found that a little cannabis helps way more than anything else they gave me.

The only therapy that helped was something called EMDR (Shapiro/Forest) which did help give me some relief from the flashbacks that I experienced daily at times. Once I knew what the demons were that plagued me so, I began to get some control.
As a practicing Buddhist, I knew that I needed to delve deeper into my practice to augment what I had learned in therapy. Using mindfulness I learned to "surf" over the tidal waves of emotion that threatened to overwhelm me. By daily practice, I have become able to mange my symptoms in two ways. One is that the overwhelming feelings are now seen as an experience to be dealt with head-on, allowing them to come and go without resistance, while holding them in conscious awareness. In a way, it sometimes feels like I'm holding a wounded frightened child, until the storm passes. In this way I can even use my mental illness as a tool for awakening.
The second is an insight that comes with practice, the insight of no-self isn't looking into a void or experienced existential dread, it is seeing that what you really are and what you believe you are are two different things.

It is very true that self improvement is a bad reason for beginning practice, as is using meditation simply to relax. The peace comes from a gradual awakening to the fact that you don't exist the way you think you do, and the view of a poor little me against the universe is simply a story I made up to scare myself with.
 
Nasruddin said:
Using mindfulness I learned to "surf" over the tidal waves of emotion that threatened to overwhelm me. By daily practice, I have become able to mange my symptoms in two ways. One is that the overwhelming feelings are now seen as an experience to be dealt with head-on, allowing them to come and go without resistance, while holding them in conscious awareness.
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Not meaning to understate the serious issues you are coping with; this reminds me of a simple truism that I practice through my own studies. I.E. You cannot control what happens to you - you can only control how you will react to it. Simple to state. Decidedly difficult to implement.

Yet it is key to much of the turmoil that life can be. People have been taught, and they desperately want to believe, that they have control over their lives and what happens in their lives. Any rational look at the world decimates that fairy tale. But teach people that rather than trying to control reality, which is not possible, they can learn to control how they will react to it gives one a super powerful tool to handle what reality throws at you.
 
Devils' Advocate said:
Not meaning to understate the serious issues you are coping with; this reminds me of a simple truism that I practice through my own studies. I.E. You cannot control what happens to you - you can only control how you will react to it. Simple to state. Decidedly difficult to implement.

Yet it is key to much of the turmoil that life can be. People have been taught, and they desperately want to believe, that they have control over their lives and what happens in their lives. Any rational look at the world decimates that fairy tale. But teach people that rather than trying to control reality, which is not possible, they can learn to control how they will react to it gives one a super powerful tool to handle what reality throws at you.
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Indeed. I think the book "Man's Search for Meaning" (Frankl) illuminates that idea very elegantly. The problem here is that in western culture we are taught that we MUST control both inner and outer things. This again is a double bind, because in a sense the controller is the controlee. The Zen masters say a knife cannot cut itself, nor a tooth bite itself.

For me, it became a very tough game indeed. Meditation practice time was anything but peaceful. Being at war with yourself is probably the hardest battle a human can fight. I remember times in meditation struggling with overwhelming feelings of rage, sadness, panic,and fear. Days would go by in which I sat in dark rooms counting out repetitions of the six syllable mantra to find comfort. I felt like I wanted to die, though the thought frightened me. I had no control and I was lost in a maelstrom of self-hate, lonliness, and despair. In a sense, I have walked through fire and death, and now I'm on the other side. The practice of mindfulness, embracing all, facing all, and turning nothing away is actually a tough discipline, but persistent practice can help one deal with the worst life hands us. In a way it is like learning internal martial art, where the key is no-resistance and you learn to not-do things. In this way you succeed. Does that make any sense?
 
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