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Mysticism, N [from
Greek mystikos, from (assumed) mystos, keeping silence]
Mysticism is a doctrine that
holds that the ultimate nature of reality lies beyond the experiences
of the senses and outside the realm of reason. For mystics, reality cannot
be described in terms of ordinary consciousness and can be reached only
through a special state of ecstasy or divine inspiration.
That state is qualitatively different from every form and activity of
normal human experience. When one reaches this ecstatic state, all sense
of separateness, apartness, and difference of the self from the nature
of the Real disappears. Self-consciousness is obliterated, and the individual
becomes one with the deepest level of reality.
All oppositions disappear in the state, which merges subject and object,
the self and others, finiteness and infinity, and even life and death.
Many religions and cultures throughout the world honour such mystical
states and believe they can produce wisdom and the power of prophecy.
Rationalists, materialists, and naturalists, however, deny the reality
of ecstatic states and mystical reality, and explain them away as forms
of psychological aberration.
Herbert Kohl,
From Archetype to Zeitgeist, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1992
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