“Il Misticismo e il Corpo”
“Die Mystik und der Körper”

Site Purpose
To inspire others to describe mystical experiences bodily and to find writers to collaborate on nailing-down mystical experience, co-author and publish.





Mystical rain-rinse of grapes, Rose Beach, MD.


Current revision: 3/23/10 Oui, je parle francais suffisement bien.

Welcome to everyone who wants to communicate meaningful "mystical" experiences. I INVITE YOU TO CONTRIBUTE! To contribute, go to the "Mysticism and the Body" page (here on Home Page box to the upper left and choose a page you may join: registries and "self").

Full text of mysticism reviews here edited: http://mysticreviewer.googlepages.com For all reviews see "mentalhelp" below.

Mystical experiences are often described as "ineffable," as in the chapter in William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. It is as "effable" as a person chooses to make it, though clearly it is hard work. (Any experience is difficult to communicate, even on the level of how to tie shoelaces.) You can make "mystical experience" as simple as what it's like following a station-wagon load of kids waving back at you. I invite bodily descriptions at all levels. The best reports are most direct and most detailed as to what is going on in the body, what it feels like,what you learn from it of significance.

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My email address: mysticreviewer@gmail.com

Parents! Encourage your children to harness internal forces of growth by recording their peak experiences on the "Children's Peak Experience Registry" page.

The purpose of this site is to encourage people to describe their mystical experiences as concretely as possible in relation to the body.


What realizations may you make at this and my other blue-linked sites?


–“Mysticism” is a word with a complex, misleadingly construed etymology.
–Scholars rarely use “mysticism” in a substantive, specific, detailed, concrete way.
–Narrower terms, as “ecstasy” or my “momentic integration,” sharpen visualization.
–Researchers invariably conflate mysticism, ecstasy, epilepsy, “mental illness,” etc.
–Hypostatized phenomena fall into feeling, light, sound, but diverge in meaning.
–So-called definitions–oneness with universe, absolute–misstate expansive feeling.
–Unlike “orgasm,” “mystical experience” undergirds lasting, emergent realizations.
–Detailing the physical dynamics of any experience is hard; of mysticism much harder.
–No one ever found mysticism in a drug (“orgasm”) or a brain wave.
–You won’t find mysticism at a nipple, rubber or flesh, or in father love, Sigmund.
(But a child’s hug may get you to a deeper yet simple “smell the roses” level!)
–Desire to publish and eschew depreciated “feeling” makes scholars intellectualize.
–Mysticism is “experience” or it’s about nothing at all; is in, of, through the “body.”
–Bucke and James say such experience founds religions, but mysticism is not religion.
–Atheists like Richard Jefferies and Abraham Maslow had “mystical experiences.”
–“Nature mysticism” is “theomaniac” code to deny “mystical experience” to non-theists.
–Music, Taijiquan, sunset, anything directly “bodily,” may spur meaningful experience.
–Ultimately you must come to terms establishing your own mystical worldview.

Communicating mystical experience as a bodily phenomenon:
Concrete verbal expression/representation or metaphor is inevitable. The question becomes: "When I am having an expansive, unitive, emotionally colored experience like this? What is going on in my body? Where and how am I experiencing it? Where in my body and in what ways do I sense myself receiving "information" from others? To what extent does the outflow of this feeling make me attractive to and attracted by others in a "magnetic"' way?" On the one hand, there is what we may call mystical/unitive/peak experiencing; on the other, there is the (Ogden and Richards, Meaning of Meaning) the problem of communicating that carefully qualitatively sensed experience. How much confidence do I have in the "adequacy" of what is reported, much less in verifying the ways in which one may experientially receive it?

I add here citations from http://mentalhelp.net/books To search my reviews easily, go into your preferred search-engine browser simply put exactly this with the quotes: "metapsychology search" . . . then put in the keyword box the case-non-sensitive name <bober>.]

Review Number One
COPYRIGHT © 2006
Anthony P. Bober
Reedited excerpt from the following published review:
Zen-Brain Reflections
by James H. Austin
MIT Press, 2006
Review by A.P. Bober on Sep 12th 2006 Volume: 10, Number: 37

D'Aquili and Newberg's "Spillover" View:
I propose a neuroendocrinological track that Dr. Austin seems to avoid (Zen and the Brain, 1998, p. 83) fruitfully pursued by his colleagues of the "UPenn school." D'Aquili and Newberg offer the most concise empirically based theory of "mystic"/unitive (See lexicon, at end of this review.) experience--"when everything comes together, all at once" (Walterreit)--on which they unfortunately impose an infantile religiosity. It goes as follows: "Spillover" (or "reversal") between "arousal structures" (sympathetic) and "quiescent structures" (parasympathetic) occurs which, as I formulate it, balances an outflow of "personal-magnetic" energy with a relaxed receptiveness underlying all mystic experience. This experience forges itself in the sensorium through innumerable byways--emotion, psychology, culture, history, and ideology. The "experient's" feeling
may vary much less. This recalls massotherapy research I did reported below. It speaks of the "experience" of bouncing between two closely placed tennis rackets, thermostat-like. D'Aquili's image suggests the "mutual-induction" coil in a car--the "primary" windings induce a current in the "secondary" windings. A "mutuality" in both cases may be a co-buildup of "energy" to a point of maximum potential.

Juan de la Cruz's Image of Brain Laterality
For me the "next step" is to fuse neuroendocrinal processes with "grounded" representational (See lexicon.) "expressions" of mystic experience, as in Borchert's reproduction (p. 288, Fig. 123) of "Roshi" Juan Yepes's perfective way to "Monte Carmelo." It seems an unintended diagram of the brain with the occipital areas toward the bottom of the page and a kind of spinal path to the mystic Elysium called by the Taoists the "diamond or crystal center" (Bober, May review. Cf. "Roshi" Teresa de Avila's "Rey"/"sol" [p. 11], "cristal" [231].) roughly encapsulated in the shape of the corpus callosum and the anterior and posterior commissures, more or less enclosing structures comprising the limbic system--amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, and hypothalamus. In a massotherapy class (Bober, 1981)

Bober's View of Neuroendocrinological Communication:
I presented a physiology paper entitled "The 'Sun Ganglion,' Consciousness, and Compassion." A deeply frustrated attempt to corroborate a "solar plexus" experience I had in a training (large-group) setting at Bethel, Maine, it synthesized "naturopathic," Eastern, "occult," and "modern Western approaches." The following crystallizes that attempt (Bober, 1984, pp. 57-8):
The continuing experience of myself as both receiver and sender of information through the "solar plexus," the neural mass around the coeliac ganglion, originally motivated this synthesis. A sun-like funnel, as it were, takes in from the "macrocosm" and reflects back into the internal "microcosm," whence information goes "up" forming words or artistic expression, reminding me of an old glass Silex percolator I'd watch pushing boiling water up to become "coffee." This process relates the thoracolumbar and craniosacral divisions of the CNS relative not only to the adrenals ["suprarenals" in England; actually a neurotransmitter dump site] and other "glands" such as the hypothalamus but also to the heart, blood pressure, and what is negatively described
as "fever," clearly related to the "glow" of peak-experiencing and expanded communing. Thermostatically the sympathetic operates through adrenergics such as norepinephrine and cholinergics such as acetylcholine keeping the organism "see-sawing" in a narrow arc. Vaso-constriction and -dilation raise and dissipate body
heat in these "higher emotions." While the hypothalamus regulates the experience of pleasure herein, we need to consider joy, love, compassion as experiences Western medicine can probe. Unfortunately, animal experimentation blinds us to their (subtler) feelings. (Uncountable times entering the Yale Medical Library I passed a portrait of the physiologist Harold Saxton Burr who poked electrodes into trees to gauge potential difference, a suggestive tool, probably the source of "biorhythms.") A quarter of a century later produced a second ("Eastern") "confirmation"as a photo in Sha (p. 80) showed nearly the exact position of hands I'd stumbled upon at a period of intense unitivity in my life at that Bethel training. He places this "Xiu Lian" ["shoo-lee-en"] between the nipples, though the photo sets the heels of the palms closer to the "solar plexus" just below the breastbone. He shows the fingers turned up more, flower- or cup-like ("lotus," he says), while I splay them right out in front. I also place the heels ofthe palms lower, roughly half way between the sternum and the navel. I move splayed hands near or far, rotating them "to the clock" as if optimizing radio reception (possibly a kind of holographic "phantom-limb 'memory'" of the umbilicus?), ultimately sensing the "right" position. Tuning a spot through which "information is sent and received" corresponds with what Sha (p. 79) calls the "message center," the locus of the middle Dan Tian (Tien), or "cauldron." This center (p. 37 in Sha) lets you commune "directly with your mind, the organs and cells" and with "sources" "outside" yourself. In this way (p. 31) you can "send and receive" information between you and "everything in the universe." Such "corroboration" suggests we can "reproduce" what Taoists learned intuitively (See lexicon.), highlighting the difference between "Eastern" experience and "Western" experimentation. (How hard could it be for Austin to put a subtly sensing "grid" between people who experience such communication? Perhaps neurologically sophisticated D.O.s like John Upledger are tuned to such subtleties.)

[Swedenborgian Balzac's "The Atheist's Mass" has "surgeon" Desplein announce that he may have known of the "solar (message) center," "When he detected a cerebral center, a nervous center, and a center for aërating the blood--the first two so perfectly complementary that in the latter years of his life he came to the conviction that the sense of hearing is not absolutely necessary, nor the sense of sight for seeing, and
that the solar plexus could supply their place without any possibility of doubt. . . ."]

[Insertion from May review below::

Teresa de Avila's "Solar Plexus" Experience?
"Recoger," and the many related terms Teresa uses, when not devoutly taken to indicate a physical "elevation," probably speaks to the kind of total, unplanned, somatopsychic sense of having one's unified forces "gathered together and up-stolen" into an exalted feeling -- "me dejaba toda abrasada en amor grande. . ." ("left me aflame in great love"; de Jesus, p. 238 [Vida, end of chapter 29]) -- that made her embarrassed to be in public while thus enthralled. (We overlook, in our own embarrassment, the "spearlike object" ["dardo"] that seemed to have fire at its iron tip "arriving at my entrails" ("entrañas") -- wherever Freud would have imagined those to be -- at the risk of overdoing the oft-noted "dovetailing" of "sexual" and "mystical" experience. This certainly explains the modern yen for the metaphors of Yepes, vaguely sexual in nature, as superior to those of Teresa and of Fray Luis de León, when an inverted order of valuation is likely more sustainable.) He entirely misses what would be for him the compatibility of the "Penn school" of "neuroscientific" explanation of mystical experience of researchers like d'Aquili and Newberg, the most developed, when it doesn't descend to churchiness, and easiest to understand of that genre.]

Did pre-"Great War" Julia (Sears) Seton, M.D. know this source, fusing knowledge of physiology and "mystical" literature, here condensed, which I challenge Austin and myself to advance? Her chariot-and-buggy mystics only used metaphors (See lexicon.) at their disposal--the "reins" flowing back from the horses to the focal point in the hands of the driver. I imagine reins leading back from multiple pairs of percherons, or, alternatively, "funnel-hands." Though her "reins" idea, unfolded with Jungian flavor reaching unitive heights, is a century old it knows no time. I've added other results of her experience placing them in (psycho-)logical order. Although she reads "metaphysical," her insights free of reference (apparently much of biblical source) or concrete referent, I tried to gird her views with "modern" physiological detail:
The prophets and mystics of old sang ever of their solar center . . . [ascribing] to the reins, knowledge, joy, pain and pleasure. The conscious command of the psychical functions through concentration of the mind and usage of the Solar Plexus has been the method of the seer for all time. . . .
The solar plexus is the center of man's universe and through it he is one with all things.
This is the "single eye." "Take heed, therefore, that thine eye be single, for if thine eye
be single thy whole body will be full of light."
The massage of the Solar Plexus through this breath gives one increased circulation of blood to the solar center and this increases its attracting power; with a full stream of psychical energy flowing in from without, a full stream of power is released by the cells of the Solar Plexus itself. This electro-radiant energy flows over the sympathetic nerves and is transmitted to the cerebro-spinal nerves and centers, and a warm glow begins to pervade the physical flesh. Over this cord there is continually passing in and out through the reins . . . the impulses we call life. All sight, hearing, feeling, and emotion, all subjective sensation are the product of the activity of these currents acting upon the solar plexus brain and nerves and through these upon the physical brain and nerves.

[Please find many more quotes from Dr. Seton in the "Documents Embodying Mysticism" (A.) page.]

A T'ai Chi Ch'uan/taijiquan saying states that "all the secrets of the universe are found in the moment between exhalation and inhalation." (Cf. 391, "chih shi" in Sha?) [Credit for this reference goes to a T'ai Chi teacher of mine, Paul Spector, of New Haven, CT.]

My metaphoric definition of "self"
Alas, lack of reference shows him untouched by literature onself-ego/I-me/"objective"-"subjective" issues--social-scientific, analytic, philosophic, ranging from G.H. Mead, through Goffman, culture-personalitystudies, Kohut, variant "social psychologies," to the humanistic-transpersonal (Austin's spare reference to Maslow no remedy), including Jung's"ego" subsumed in that "centerof my totality" "Self." He could have used an "Eastern" artist-palette image (Bober, 1984, p. 39) with the "hole" the vaunted Western "ego" engulfed in the wood arc as expansive "self," often put down among us. Richer the single-hewn-drum image, the "djembe," hourglass-shaped with tuning strings connecting a hide head to a "waist" "belt" just above which a circling string wends tightening with "knots" the "verticals" each representing for me a bio-psycho-historical "force"--genetic-congenital variance, "intelligence," perception, ethnicity, age, gender-role, family, region, nation, historical period--producing a roughly balanced, tuned head, its degree of tautness also affected by "cultural" humidity or dryness. In "tension" one's "self" strikes a best "I'm-dancing-as-fast-as-I-can" balance. (See my lexicon for a view Austin can't well stuff in his suitcase.) [See in my "Definitions of Self" page the complications that the similar "talking drum" creates for the "djembe" metaphor. All metaphors eventually break down and "lie."]
__________
Lexicon:
Adiaphor-ism/ist: demonstrating no interest in theological matters; a person who does so. In a rough, general way, as we move from Western to Eastern "religions" such as Zen, Tao, (and Shinto?) there is no Cosmic Muffin in the Sky.
Enlightenment: to "have a light" or "feel lighter" inside.
Experience: the etymological core (Lewis, p. 693) of the word is to "try, prove, put to the test, (reflexively) make a trial of one's powers." (Bober, 1984, p. 37) A notion of ‘non-linear wholeness’ is implied in ‘experienced.’
Ecstasy: "standing outside of (as a clone)" or expansion beyond like ripple-rings around the proverbial pebble in the pool.
Hypnosis: other-guided focus. This increases imaginative attentiveness as "focus" implies. "Other" may be another person or an Assagiolian "higher self," but all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. Many in a demonstration group were "gone" hearing the yodeling record one hypnologist brought thinking it an "induction."
Impropulsion: movement from within, activating and enlivening outer (and "inner") "objects" in a synergistic process of reciprocal growth, challenge, discovery.
Intuition: generally, it means capturing an immediate sense, knowledge, or realization about something and holding it with conviction, even if that conviction is at times not well founded. Less nebulously it is a "seeing" as if with the whole being, the self as Jung propounded it, upon becoming rooted to some "object." As one peers
into it, restudies the material, steeps in it, a magma of concepts and metaphors exudes.
Mysticism: an experience sensed, psychophysiologically, as warmth and "electromagnetic" ("centrolodic") flow to, from, and through the body directing heightened communion with the "world"/"other" /"object" producing an overwhelming "impropulsion" toward representational expression yielding a psychologically interconnective ("unitive," "centractive," "centrofluxive") insight, irrevocably recontouring self-in-the-world. (One of Dr. Austin's books suggests "ineffability" for Greek "mu" though "mueo" means "initiate into mysteries" and "muo" "shut," as eyes [perhaps mouth, ears, and other orifices. This keeps the secret of the mystery cult and allows you to "go in" before expanding out.]) {In a recent review the short version: "'momentic' integration"}
Metaphor(-ization)/Expression/Representation: the simmering process ever arising from mute psychophysiological realms until expulsed grappling hooks of insight lash experience to cogently arresting linguistic imagery. Raynor C. Johnson (Watcher on the Hills: A Study of Some Mystical Experiences of Ordinary People. London: Hodder, 1959/NY: Harper, 1960, p. 27) refers to a radio talk by William Golding who speaks of language that "fits over experience like a straight-jacket."
Neurophysiology/Neuroendocrinology: this non-specialist in medicine hopes to refer to the operations of the peripheral nervous system [including the (para-)sympathetic (autonomic, generally)] as it relates to the spinal cord, brain, and para-cortical systems as they impinge on conscious and unconscious processes
involved in "unitive" experiences.
Self: the total experiencing center of the human being comprising for that individual all she or he has been, is, may become in thought, feeling, spirit, mood on the levels of the conscious and unconscious through reflective inner-directed and other-directed involvement in the world (Bober, 1984, p. 39).
Unitive: less ambiguous or stained by "mystic" history the term refers to that kind of experience that carries conscious/ego/"everyday" awareness inclusively to a full, deep, rich rooting in the "romance"of everyday wonders, merely linguistically different from "peak-experience." [As "peak" is not an adjective, the term logically requires a hyphen.] Word descriptions become "paradoxical," so to speak, as the right brain
laughs up its sleeve at the naively rational left.
Wholeness is a ‘total’ experiential (collective-cognitive) realization obviating the need to search. (8-28-86) ‘Starting’ occurs at the apron of a new wholeness.

REFERENCES
Bober, Anthony Peter. "Me, the Struggle to Be: An Odyssey of Uncovery, Unfoldment, and Completion of the Self." M.A. Thesis. Center for Humanistic Studies. 1984. [Find the essence in "Documents" page.]
________. "The 'Sun Ganglion,' Consciousness, and Compassion." Physiology paper presented in the Myomassology class taught by Irene Gauthier, Southfield, Michigan, April 27, 1981.
________. Review of Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul, San Francisco: Harper, 2004. ReviewedJune 17, 2005, Metapsychology Online Reviews (mentalhelp.net/books) 9:24 .© 2006 A. P. Bober
Borchert, Bruno. Mysticism: Its History and Challenge. York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1994.
Lewis and Short. Latin Dictionary.
Sha, Zhi Gang. Power Healing: The Four Keys to Energizing Your Body, Mind, and Spirit. New York: Harper, 2002.
Walterreit, Linda C. "What Is the Experience of the Moment When Everything Comes Together, All at Once?" Masters' thesis, Merrill-Palmer Institute, August, 1980.
Upledger, John. SomatoEmotional Release: Deciphering the Language of Life Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 2002.

COPYRIGHT © 2006
Anthony P. Bober
All rights reserved

A.P. Bober has studied a psychology spanning Skinner and a humanistic-clinical view based on existential phenomenology and had been a PhD candidate in a substantive yet philosophic European-based sociology including the "critical" view. His teaching augmented courses in group theory/"small-group developmental dynamics" (lab) while introducing "sociology of knowledge" and "issues in biological anthropology," with
publications in the first two fields. Currently he is writing a book on mystical experience as metaphorically tied to neurophysiology.


Review Number Two
COPYRIGHT © 2005
Anthony P. Bober
All rights reserved
The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between
Darkness and Spiritual Growth
by Gerald G. May
HarperSanFrancisco, 2004
Review by A.P. Bober on Jun 17th 2005 Volume: 9, Number: 24

The following is an edited selection from the above originally published in
Metapsychology Online Reviews:
Regarding the theological language of Teresa de Avila and Juan Yepes (de la Cruz), the only available (ideological) "jacket" of the times that could gloss the "peak-experiences" they reported was "theology." Reviewing extensive research on the subject yielding three dozen moot issues, I find May reveals degrees of misconception re the following. "Mysticism" is as "effable" as any objectifiable, wordless experience
can be but almost certainly not before cool Monday-morning quarterbacking. Failure ofthe hard work of poetized or other expressive communication of "raw" experience [Apparently words "cook" it!] stands in the way as a kind of anticipation of the "agony of realization." "Las palabras sólo permiten un intento de aproximación a lo inefable." (Rossi [4.], p. 239; "Words only give us a hint of the ineffable."). Oddly, May includes Teresa in a book that explores a subtitled "darkness and spiritual growth." Having read key works of prose and poetry by and about Teresa, I'm unable to recall any reference to "darkness." She is a writer of light, "diamond" (the "rey/king" at the center of the "moradas/chambers"), verdant "palmitos" and other items with
mandalic centrality, lyrics and sounds of an uplifting sort, and perfumes (whose scent her strict "ordered" life did not prevent having her sheets imbued with). Juan himself may only be situationally attracted to darkness, one filled with the Toledan starlight. Brennan (1.), p. 30, refers to Juan's being imprisoned in a six-by-ten-foot
closet -- perhaps inspiring a "womb"-obsession I shall not carry to Freudian lengths -- "lit by a loop-hole three fingers wide" through which I seem to recall he was barely able to see the night. Brennan notes (p. 48) "his predilection for retiring to some dark and confined place that opened onto a wide view." At the location referred to, Iznatoraf, Yepes would repair to a cupboard-sized belfry where "through a loop-hole [another!] in the wall one had a view of hills and green fields."

Juan de la Cruz on Brain-Lateralization:
May, p. 56, misses the brain-lateralization in Yepes' sketch (Brennan, p. 48) of Mount Carmel. It's not hard to see in it the "mushroom-cloud" nature of its vertical centrality representing the human brain trailing into a "medulla oblongata" showing a very modern, balanced sense of "left-and right-brain." On the left are "scientia" and "intellectus," as we would expect of that crudely narrow "ego" side. (Unfortunately also there is the "sapientia"/"wisdom we'd expect on the right.) On the right we "properly" find the expansiveness of "c(h)aritas," "gaudium" ("joy," "ecstasy"), "patientia," "pax," "continentia" (perhaps best rendered as "moderation," with a sense of "balance," "centeredness"). The "split" may further be reflected in the "dos maneras" (May, p. 206, note 8) of "activa" and "passiva." Further, the reference, p. 119, to Teresa's "gustos" versus "contentos" may further underscore the split.

Teresa de Avila's Radially Symmetric "Mandala" Image:
That Teresa's view of the "integration of the personality" is like a Jungian "mandala," not a serially arranged "periwinkle" of "rooms"/"stages" one behind the other, is seen when she says "estaban colocadas como las hojas de un palmito, un fruto compuesto por una serie de hojas estrechamente unidas alrededor de una parte central que es la que se puede comer." (Rossi, p. 231) Or again at the center one finds a "Rey" or "sol" "como un palmito, que para llegar a lo que es de comer tiene muchas coberturas. . . ." (de Jesus [1.], p. 11). There is a radial symmetry of "leaves" such that one arrives at the central fruit much like eating an artichoke by peeling away each covering leaf -- not a bad metaphor for the modern humanistic psychology these intrapsychic geniuses anticipate.
Thought dead Teresa had been laid in a casket with the usual wax drippings covering her eyes when she "woke up," whether from a meditatively induced comatose-like stateor from a "catatonia" likely to be a questionably imposed "diagnosis"; a certain Sor María de la Visitación developed "stigmata" -- shown in the last century easy toproduce by "somnambulists" who go into the "other-guided focus" of "hypnosis" with relish and depth -- until the Inquisition questioned a nun who peeked through a keyhole claiming to see her "painting her wounds and proved the truth of this evidence by washing them. . . ." (Brennan, pp. 61-2)

Teresa de Avila on Paradox:
To his credit May leans on the issue of paradox as when Teresa says: "I find it helpful to speak nonsense." (p. 125); "The understanding, if it does understand, does not understand how it understands." (p. 126). This is the "classic theme," p. 208, note 28, of "understanding by not understanding" as in the "docta ignorantia"of Nicolaus Cusanus, where we may say the full powers of "both sides of our awareness" are mediated as "insight" through the corpus callosum, or, as a student of humanistic psychology, Linda Walterreit (5.), stated it, as "the moment when everything comes together, all at once." (Even the famous "gestalt gorilla" in the cage put boxes and sticks "insightfully" together to get at suspended bananas.) There are simply times in our lives when words of experiential conviction pass our lips such that we absolutely "know" in a way not reducible to syllogism or "scientific" inference. That paradox partly expresses itself in the psychological "obscurity," p. 67, May rightly distinguishes from physical darkness.
May tends to view "oración" more as "prayer" in a devotional sense incompatible with the self-unifying, focused meditation Teresa drove through the restrictive forms of her time. Teresa used numerous terms -- "arrobamiento" (a being "robbed up into"?), "traspasamiento," "recogimiento," etc. -- the last of which May meaninglessly renders as a kind of cognitive transcendence, "The Lord made me recollected during conversation. . . ." (p. 22). "Recoger," and the many related terms Teresa uses, when not devoutly taken to indicate a physical "elevation," probably speaks to the kind of total, unplanned, somatopsychic sense of having one's unified forces "gathered together and up-stolen" into an exalted feeling -- "me dejaba toda
abrasada en amor grande. . ." ("left me aflame in great love"; de Jesus, p. 238 [Vida, end of chapter 29]) -- that made her embarrassed to be in public while thus enthralled. (We overlook, in our own embarrassment, the "spearlike object" ["dardo"] that seemed to have fire at its irontip "arriving at my entrails" ["entrañas"] -- wherever Freud would have imagined those to be -- at the risk of overdoing the oft-noted "dovetailing" of "sexual" and "mystical" experience. This certainly explains the modern yen for the metaphors of Yepes, vaguely sexual in nature, as superior to those of Teresa and of Fray Luis de León, when an inverted order of valuation is likely more sustainable.)
__________
Brennan, Gerald. Saint John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry. Cambridge, 1973.
De Jesus, Teresa. Las Moradas/Libro de su Vida. Mexico, D.F.: Porrúa, 1992.
Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966.
Rossi, Rosa. Teresa de Ávila: Biografía de una escritora. Barcleona: Icaria, 1984.
Walterreit, L.C. What is the experience of the moment when everything comes
together all at once? Unpublished master's thesis, Merrill-Palmer Institute, 1980.

Copyright © 2005
Anthony P. Bober
All rights reserved


Review Number Three

Copyright © 2005
Anthony P. Bober
All rights reserved

Shadow, Self, Spirit
by Michael Daniels
Imprint Academic, 2005
Review by A.P. Bober on Dec 19th 2006 Volume: 10, Number: 51


I note that no single person's landscapinging of their, or even his, mystical experience shows forth, except for Bucke's, 18, backhanded self-reference over a century and a third old when he and friends in England read current British poets and especially our Whitman. During a long post-midnight ride in a hansom he, in peace from the "ideas, images and emotions" of the evening (Bucke, unpaginated 3-4 from
Acklom's "The Man and the Book") "found himself wrapped around . . . by a flame-coloured cloud [as if from] some sudden conflagration in the great city [realizing that] the light was within himself."
The virtual absence of any direct record of personal experience in the book underscores what the sociologist C. Wright Mills called "abstracted empiricism." Though Mills had survey research specifically in mind, Daniels illustrates similar problems when he says, 58, "Let us consider a concrete example." What follows
presents no concrete instance of any person's experience of so-called near-death experience, NDE. Words like "typically," "may," "such" reveal a pastiche of abstract, general typification. As his example of psi gives rise to the issue of just what a mystical experience is, I offer my view less broad than that of Daniels: the
spontaneous occurrence, often after frustrated searching below awareness, of expanded, interconnective coming together within the person as the quintessence (Austin); systematic meditative pursuit, along flame-self-extinguishing-nirvana lines, in a tradition of discipline, e.g., Zen; so-called psychic awareness beyond one's integumentary envelope of, say, blips of light and cold spots. Daniels includes the
last; I do not.

Regarding, 268, the spiral-dynamic, as in a bedspring/torus or the Slinky that walks down the stairs image, versus the structural-hierarchical, ladder, a third alternative crops up: a non-progressive, changing-manifold conception of transpersonal development. Imagine a big cigar smoke ring slowly rolled out in front of the mouth. Rings of varying size can be blown through the first at varying velocities to produce, if you will, vases of varying shapes composed of the rings in relation to each other. There is no beginning or end, priority or superiority, as with either a spiral or a ladder view: a spiral Slinky always has a beginning and end of the winding flat wire and a ladder has a beginning, middle, and end. Unitive, 258, becomes a problematic term in the contexts in
which it applies: sensed separated parts of our experience, as of what we call the body, become connected, whole, as in the emotional blush of mystical experience. Using the term in the sense of relating ourselves to some presumed theurgic entity just diminishes us. A series of terms, not all of which Daniels uses--spirit, anim-us/-a, phren-, psyche--all revolve around the simple yet profound process of breathing and the emotion it implies. I recall my first classical Greek teacher saying that for the Greeks the mind was in the chest; emotion percolates into cognitive content. It seems to me that Western religious bureaucracies teased out that ideal and seemingly non-physical soul to be controlled, as the sociologist Max Weber would put it, through psychic coercion by religious virtuosos. We all profit from studying Onians on these concepts. Similarly, 198, Daniels deprecates the physical as gross. Finally, despite his dissertation on Maslow, Daniels doesn't seem to notice that a scan of Bucke's cosmic-consciousness concept reveals many ideas that with just a slight twist become elements of Maslow's B-motivation and peak-experiencing.

Gaffes
The Greek daimon, 284-5, causes confusion as d(a)emon, as if referring to a palpable being. It translates best as Socrates' inner voice, capacity, or power, often the insightful synthesizing power of the right brain, similar to traditional notions of genius and charisma. The neologistic heterarchy along with hierarchy, 290, are neither contraries nor contradictories. Hierachy means "the holy place is first," showing religious organization as the historical antecedent of bureaucracy. From the Greek heterarchy would mean "the other is first," thus being the very opposite of the transpersonalists' meaning of egalitarianism. Table 7, top, 86, opposes his ecstasy and falsly neologistically created enstasy , in fact the same, the former better viewed as expansion out
beyond one's usual sense of envelope from within rather than some psychological standing outside oneself as a clone. Compare Oprah's foolishly conceived non-contraries, history versus herstory, two words containing no "story" but, instead, the Greek element histor- for "investigation." Daniels imbues an apotheosized Kosmos, 202, with what he calls mind and spirit versus Cosmos which he conceives as the physical universe, the only kind there can be, although for the Greeks the latter implied order versus chaos.

References
Austin, James, H. Zen-Brain Reflections. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006.
Reviewed in Metapsychology Online Reviews (mentalhelp.net/books) on Sept. 12,
2006, Vol. 10, No. 37
Bucke, Richard Maurice, M.D. Cosmic Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 1969;
1901, Innes.
Onians, Richard B. The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind,
the Soul, the World [,] Time, and Fate. Cambridge [U.K.]: Cambridge, 1951.

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Anthony P. Bober
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Excerpts from the Site Creator's reviews for his use:

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Quantum Archetypes
Science, Metaphysics and Spirit
by Robert J. Verdicchio
Authorhouse, 2005
Review by A. P. Bober on Jun 6th 2006
Volume: 10, Number: 23

While on the subject of mysticism, which he explicitly picks up again later (63), I don't come any closer to him in his wildly varied and discursive tract than when he says, "The force fields within the psyche are similar to the force/energy fields in physics and chemistry in the sense that they all form a continuum for interaction." Beyond the realist-nominalist issues in the terminology as opposed to the "realities" to which they hope to refer and his vague use of "psyche" that I would have made concretely to refer to the meditatively breathing body, I think "force field" may make some sense. The vague terms of physics, usually undefined except as abstract elements of formulae, like "electromagnetic," have at least "metaphoric" parallels in the ways in which, for example, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems may support a kind of neurotransmitter "communication" beyond the "envelope" of the body through those related dump sites inaccurately called "glands," adrenals or, more graphically in England, "suprarenals" [1] ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Graceful Exits
How Great Beings Die
by Sushila Blackman (Editor)
Shambhala, 1997
Review by A. P. Bober on May 14th 2005
Volume: 9, Number: 19

We in the West have more than great difficulty hearing without a smile the kind of thing Mantak Chia has regaled us with in his recent "bodhisattva" legacy of Taoist books written for our drive-up-window eyes. He tells the kind of "story," which may have been his, of the disciple who goes to the cave where his master is sitting having "left" his body to join the "immortals." The disciple goes there periodically to "dust the old guy off." Speaking very generally it seems to me that we in the West "verify" experiences by traditions of rational experiment and observation while Eastern adepts learn by augmenting received experiences of processes a Western reductionism could not even find. This does not mean that the entire armamentarium of intuitively perceived "meridians," chi/ki/prana energies, etc., has to be blindly accepted. (In my own experience, much of it has been "experienceable" in such practices as body work and Tai Chi Ch'uan.) In a similar way one could say that "scientists" and "artists" do "exactly" the same thing using different methods of immersion in concrete reality.

Panpsychism
by D. S. Clarke
SUNY Press, 2003
Review by A.P. Bober on Oct 4th 2004
Volume: 8, Number: 41

Although he speaks around terms like "psyche" and "mentality," a glossary with tightly defined terms would have helped, especially since my etymological study shows "soul" to be a bit beyond psyche’s sense of "breathing" while "mind" comes down to "memory," to me a bodily function.

The Meaning of Mind
Language, Morality, and Neuroscience
by Thomas Szasz
Praeger, 1996
Review by Anthony P. Bober on Aug 15th 2004
Volume: 8, Number: 33

As "mind" is the key word of the title, Szasz, typically conversant in classical languages as a European-trained scholar, refers to the Latin "mens," "mind," in a way that may seem logical. The problem is that the original sense of "mind," an English word of generally Norse-German parentage, is "memory," a concept of clearly neurophysiological import difficult enough to deal with on that less "Geist-y" level.

Science, Consciousness and Ultimate Reality
by David Lorimer (Editor)
Imprint Academic, 2004
Review by A. P. Bober on Apr 19th 2005
Volume: 9, Number: 16

Compare Carr, p. 34, where "cosmos" or "Universe" [the Theistic Upper-Case?] means "the entirety of physical creation"--Now there's a presupposition for you!--and "mind" bluringly dissolves into "Man," "consciousness," or "spirit," despite the actual etymology that narrows it a bit to "memory," presumably a selective, recreated experience necessarily occurring in and through the body.
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