peak experiences all the time. This is because the peak experience is a perception — something suddenly
grasped
, like Archimedes’ perception of the law of floating bodies. It is not easy to grasp, because of the ‘logical’ limitations of the left brain. But once it has been seen, once it has become an
insight
, it can be recreated by a kind of mental flick of the wrist.
This is an exciting recognition, for it means that we are on the way to grasping how the peak experience — or even the mystical experience — can be recreated at will. We find it difficult to hold on to such experiences because our words and ideas are too crude and simplistic. (We have seen, for example, how Bergson’s insight can actually enable us to understand what happens in the peak experience by providing us with a more complex set of ideas.) A person who is overwhelmed by the mystical experience could be compared to someone who is given a glimpse of a city from an aeroplane, and then told to make a drawing of it from memory.
This
is why the mystical vision is ineffable — not because it is impossible to express in language, but because our language is at present too crude. Once we have learned to make some kind of simple map of the main features of the city, we have taken a major step towards learning how to recreate the peak experience — or the mystical experience — at will.
It must be admitted that Maslow once remarked that peak experiences should not be confused with mystical experiences. But he was only pointing out that they are different in degree, not in kind. In fact it is obvious that the two have a great deal in common. Consider, for example, the following mystical experience described by Anne Bancroft, a lecturer in comparative religion:
‘When I was young … I felt sure that there was a wonder and a mystery and all the world was somehow full of a meaning which I couldn’t really understand and couldn’t reach … I was sure that I truly belonged to it and that it had a great deal to do with God, whom I called the Presence because he seemed often to be present to me when I was alone in the fields and woods.
‘But when I was sixteen I became afraid and stopped it all. I was afraid that I might lose myself altogether and although I had wanted this when I was younger, now the outer, everyday world had attractions for me too and I began to reject the inner, solitary quest.’
That is to say, she deliberately suppressed the right-brain mode of grasping reality in favour of a more practical approach.
When I was very young I married and started a family. The years began to trickle past but the marriage was not a happy one, we were completely unsuited to each other, and it ended with a bitter sense of guilt and failure. I kept the children and took them to America, where I remarried. But this marriage too was founded on sand and not on rock, and in a last-ditch effort to keep it going I persuaded my husband to return with us to England, hoping that a calmer and saner society might help us both. I think it did, but it was too late to save the relationship. It was when this marriage too seemed doomed to end in a wasteland of quarrels, jealousy, fear and hatred, that I suddenly woke up to the fact that something had gone badly wrong, not just with this situation but with me. Looking hard at myself I saw that I had become really futile, so much a slave to my emotions, so involved with my own feelings, so centred on myself that my life had narrowed down to the compulsive behaviour of a zombie. Where was the true? I saw clearly that something vital was missing in me. It lay there out of my reach, even beyond my imagination, because I could not see what it was: I only knew I was without it.
I then came to a time of great despair. In the middle of ordinary life — of looking after my children and sending them to school and playing with them, trying not to be inadequate for them — I saw myself as a person of no light, a
grasped
, like Archimedes’ perception of the law of floating bodies. It is not easy to grasp, because of the ‘logical’ limitations of the left brain. But once it has been seen, once it has become an
insight
, it can be recreated by a kind of mental flick of the wrist.
This is an exciting recognition, for it means that we are on the way to grasping how the peak experience — or even the mystical experience — can be recreated at will. We find it difficult to hold on to such experiences because our words and ideas are too crude and simplistic. (We have seen, for example, how Bergson’s insight can actually enable us to understand what happens in the peak experience by providing us with a more complex set of ideas.) A person who is overwhelmed by the mystical experience could be compared to someone who is given a glimpse of a city from an aeroplane, and then told to make a drawing of it from memory.
This
is why the mystical vision is ineffable — not because it is impossible to express in language, but because our language is at present too crude. Once we have learned to make some kind of simple map of the main features of the city, we have taken a major step towards learning how to recreate the peak experience — or the mystical experience — at will.
It must be admitted that Maslow once remarked that peak experiences should not be confused with mystical experiences. But he was only pointing out that they are different in degree, not in kind. In fact it is obvious that the two have a great deal in common. Consider, for example, the following mystical experience described by Anne Bancroft, a lecturer in comparative religion:
‘When I was young … I felt sure that there was a wonder and a mystery and all the world was somehow full of a meaning which I couldn’t really understand and couldn’t reach … I was sure that I truly belonged to it and that it had a great deal to do with God, whom I called the Presence because he seemed often to be present to me when I was alone in the fields and woods.
‘But when I was sixteen I became afraid and stopped it all. I was afraid that I might lose myself altogether and although I had wanted this when I was younger, now the outer, everyday world had attractions for me too and I began to reject the inner, solitary quest.’
That is to say, she deliberately suppressed the right-brain mode of grasping reality in favour of a more practical approach.
When I was very young I married and started a family. The years began to trickle past but the marriage was not a happy one, we were completely unsuited to each other, and it ended with a bitter sense of guilt and failure. I kept the children and took them to America, where I remarried. But this marriage too was founded on sand and not on rock, and in a last-ditch effort to keep it going I persuaded my husband to return with us to England, hoping that a calmer and saner society might help us both. I think it did, but it was too late to save the relationship. It was when this marriage too seemed doomed to end in a wasteland of quarrels, jealousy, fear and hatred, that I suddenly woke up to the fact that something had gone badly wrong, not just with this situation but with me. Looking hard at myself I saw that I had become really futile, so much a slave to my emotions, so involved with my own feelings, so centred on myself that my life had narrowed down to the compulsive behaviour of a zombie. Where was the true? I saw clearly that something vital was missing in me. It lay there out of my reach, even beyond my imagination, because I could not see what it was: I only knew I was without it.
I then came to a time of great despair. In the middle of ordinary life — of looking after my children and sending them to school and playing with them, trying not to be inadequate for them — I saw myself as a person of no light, a
Similar Books
