Toward Understanding Mystical Consciousness: an Analysis of a Text From Simone Weil (original) (raw)

2003, Religion and Theology

Textual analysis represents the most viable approach towards gaining a greater understanding of the nature and characteristics of mystical consciousness. An analysis of a text from Simone Weil, the French philosopher and champion of workers' rights, indicates that mystical consciousness is a received moment of heightened awareness. Mystical consciousness is both self-aware and aware of an other. It may be mediated through language such as poems or prayers. It is the nature of mystical consciousness to create an outward or transcendent movement, a transformative ego-shift. Finally, mystical consciousness displays the characteristics proper to ordinary consciousness, but is qualitatively different in terms of intensity, absorption and boundaries. In his work on the philosophy of the mind, The Mystery of Consciousness (19997:195), John Searle discards traditional dualism in favour of a more integral approach to human consciousness: What I am trying to do is to re-draw the conceptual map: if you have a map on which there are only two mutually exclusive territories, the 'mental' and the 'physical,' you have a hopeless map and you will never find your way about. In the real world there are lots of territorieseconomic, political, meteorological, athletic, social, mathematical, chemical, physical, literary, artistic, etc. These are all parts of one unified world. This is an obvious point, but such is the power of our Cartesian heritage that it is very hard to grasp. What Searle says about the study of human consciousness applies equally well to the study of mystical experience. To discuss mysticism is to embark on a journey in which one sets foot upon many different territories. This is because mysticism is a complex, but unified set of perceptions in which the interplay of bodily sensation, consciousness, and knowledge contributes to what Carmody and Carmody (1996:10) call