MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
Religiosity and mystical experience
According to Huston Smith (1) — with slight alteration — I define an experience as religious when "the immediate and intuitive experience of a transpersonal dimension occurs, generating a virtuous disposition and harmonious feelings". Religious life involves, at a minimum, three basic factors:
1. speculation: a speculative, philosophical side; it is the expression of the rational function of the mind. Ambiguities and basic problems of human existence are investigated and discussed: unity versus diversity, determinism and freedom, good and evil, time and eternity, ethical absolutism and relativism, theism, atheism and pantheism, life and death, attachment, etc.;
2. ethics: the active expression of religious principles, concern for others, the observance of rules of conduct and an ethics, the fulfillment of social duties that are substantiated by the religious commitments of the affiliate.
3. consecration: the cultivation of the experience of the sacred, of the encounter with totality, with what is divine — not so much rationally, but intuitively.
It is undeniable that religion shares the first two facets with other social functions and interests, such as philosophy, education, medicine, social work, ecology, etc., but the third function, the search for the sacred culminating in mystical union, is genuine, specific and essential for an activity to be recognized, without margin of doubt, as 'religious'.
Beyond a few dogmatic sectarians, few will argue against the idea that:
- the essence of a true and full religiosity is configured as the search for the sacred, crowned by the realization of the mystical experience of union;
- a mystical experience is an expanded state of consciousness;
- the most primordial and traditional paths of humanity, modernly pointed to by indigenous peoples, shamans and syncretic religions, with the use of psychoactive plants as sacrament — in this case, the ritualistic use of Ayahuasca — are competent to provide states of ecstasy and mystical union.
Thousands recognize and attest to the fundamental spiritual value of these experiences.
(1) Do Drugs Have Religious Import? Huston Smith, Ph.D. The Journal of Philosophy, Vol LXI, No. 18, September 17, 1964