Osama bin Laden and a Return to a Perennial Theory of Mystical Union
by Jens Söring

One way to answer our question is to apply the highly refined tools of modern academic scholarship to texts like our excerpts above. We can ask: how did Abulafia’s Jewish definition of “annihilation” differ from Junayd’s Muslim one? How did other writers of the same period use the term in each tradition? How did Abulafia’s and Junayd’s respective students interpret these passages? What do modern scholars in Jerusalem and Cairo have to tell us on this subject? And so on.

Through such an analysis of primary sources, we can certainly develop a very detailed understanding of areas of historical religious study such as theology, which centers on the evolution and progressive refinement of verbally expressed concepts. Here there is a close and clear relationship between words and the ideas to which they refer. But it is far from obvious to me, at least, that such a strong nexus between terms and their referents exists when it comes to descriptions of mystical union, virtually all of which mention in some way the ineffability of the experience: “I cannot designate him because he leaves no sign,” one of our medieval Sufis tells us, while our twenty-first century Christian author admits that “I cannot say what I saw.” And if indeed “you do not speak nor can you speak” of such things, then we must question whether the historico-critical method can actually help us to understand the experience of union itself, as opposed to the texts and their fumbling attempts to put the inexpressible into words.

Of course such doubts about the suitability and usefulness of the usual philological tools—in this one case at least—are unlikely to arise among scholars who have spent their professional lives working successfully with these tools in other areas. After all, if we do not study the written accounts of mystical union, what exactly are we supposed to study? Mystical union itself?

Well ... why not?

This is, in essence, what I have done—or, to be more precise, what God allowed me to do: the last of the descriptions of mystical union above is mine. By visiting “the non-place without soul and body” myself, I gained—among many, many other things—some insight both into the actual nature of Christian unio mystica and into the degree of separation between the experience itself and its verbal expressions. My hope and belief is that “field experiments” like mine can provide new approaches to the question of whether a perennial theory of mystical union is to be preferred over the currently predominant theory.

Now, I realize very well that my claim to have undergone unio mystica is likely to be greeted with bemusement at best and derision at worst. Since the experience was entirely internal, I can offer no indisputable proof that it did indeed take place. Thus I will have to devote the next few paragraphs to providing some minimal basis for believing me, whereupon we shall return to the subject at hand.

First of all, it may help you to know that I did not wake up one morning and decide to have a little mystical union later that day, at tea-time perhaps. Even God himself needed just about seventeen years to prepare me, as I have detailed at length elsewhere.16 For those interested in such things, I can provide the dates of the classical stages of my mystical journey: purgation of worldly, physical attachments (1986-1994); illumination, with both a transcendent, “intellectual,” gnosis-based facet and an immanent, “emotional,” agape-based one (1994); “dark night,” with one primarily emotional and another predominantly existential phase (1994-2000; 2000-2003); and finally union (February 19, 2003, 10:31 to 11:07 a.m.). In any event, I have certainly paid my dues.

Secondly, I think it significant that I myself was completely surprised by this experience. Until February 19, 2003, I believed that descriptions of mystical union like those excerpted earlier were essentially the product of overwrought medieval imaginations. Quite frankly, I thought myself above such things—too skilled in the proper, ascetical techniques of contemplative prayer. Thus I cannot be accused of seeking a spiritual experience I half-disbelieved and half-disdained.

And finally, I can confirm that the union of February 19, 2003, has indeed produced those changes in my life and outlook which contemplative masters like St. Teresa of Avila describe as signs or proofs of its genuineness. In fact, it took me several weeks just to overcome the shock and develop some perspective on what had happened to me. As I write this essay roughly two months after the event, I am only beginning to work out the implications—including the possible relevance of mystical union to issues like the clash of cultures between Islam and Christianity. (Here too my life appears to be echoing, however faintly, those of great contemplatives like St. Catherine of Siena and Fr. Thomas Merton, who also developed a strong interest in the politics of their ages. Whether that “counts” as another “proof” of the authenticity of my experience, I leave to you. Knowing no further ways to establish my bona fides, I will now return to our central question: is mystical union perennial—universally the same across all cultures and ages? Or are there as many fundamentally different unions as there are religions—or possibly even practitioners? What I believe and hope to show is that those scholars who hold the latter view were led into error by a misunderstanding of what mystical union actually is.)

Throughout this essay and elsewhere, I have followed the common usage and described mystical union as an experience. This term is, in fact, inappropriate to the subject and may be responsible for what I believe to be a fundamental mistake by some scholars. Simply put, “experience” implies an object: one has an experience of something, one experiences something (even if that thing is an emotional state like joy). But in mystical union, there is no thing that one is experiencing; there is only consciousness without any object.

If the above is true, then the familiar Kantian theory of mediated experience cannot be applied to mystical union. Mediation—the fundamentally creative re-shaping process of the mind, involving its various psychological and cultural filters—requires an object that is then mediated, filtered or re-shaped. But if mystical union is at its very core the absence of any object, any thing—if God is “pure nothing,” as Meister Eckhart claimed in the fourteenth century—then the mind has no raw material to mold and form into a Christian unio mystica that is fundamentally different from Muslim fana’. What the mind cannot grasp, it cannot reconfigure.

Do I have any evidence to support this hypothesis? I could, of course, produce a long list of excerpts from apophatic mystics like Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, whose writings frequently describe God as “no-thing.” But that approach only leads us back into what I suspect is a philological wild goose chase: trying to nail down precisely what Eckhart means by “nothing” without having any firm grasp ourselves of that term’s referent. So instead I will introduce you not to Eckhart’s or Tauler’s no-thing but to “my” no-thing—the no-thing with which I underwent union on February 19, 2003—in order to give you some sense of why I believe this no-thing was not a mental object (or state) subject to the otherwise universal mediating process of the mind.

Fairly soon after embarking on a regular discipline of contemplative prayer, I became aware very occasionally of a Presence within. Other practitioners of contemplation and the vast literature of this field persuade me that this experience is common; indeed, the term “Presence” is not my own but has been borrowed from my fellow journeyers. What “Presence” aims to express is a definite awareness that there appears to be something foreign inside the mind—something that is entirely different from all the other mental objects or states in the field of one’s consciousness. Unfortunately, this ... something ... is perceptible only so briefly and intermittently that one cannot determine any of its qualities, so one needs an indefinite, somewhat “spooky” term like “Presence” to capture this something’s elusiveness and ineffability. Already, at the very beginning of one’s contemplative career, one runs up against the limits of language to describe something that is undeniably real but somehow inaccessible to the mind’s usual (verbal) tools!

Over the months and years, glimpses of this “Presence” within become more frequent; my prayer life could in fact be described as an often maddeningly frustrating trek toward a clearer and clearer view of the “Presence.” As my familiarity with this phenomenon increased somewhat, it occurred to me—as it has occurred to many other practitioners and authors in the field—that this “Presence” could equally well be called an “Absence.” And here we reach the key concept at the very heart of this essay’s argument. If the field of one’s consciousness can be imagined as a circle, like the view through a telescope, then the “Presence/Absence” is an area within that circle that is dark, in the special sense of “not there.” Imagine again a photograph shot through a telescope of a night sky; there will be some patches of pure blackness on that picture where there are no stars; but those patches of blackness are still of a kind, the same in nature as those sections of the photograph where there are stars. The “Presence/Absence,” on the other hand, is like a area that has been cut out of the picture and replaced with black velvet.

Everywhere else on the surface of that photograph, both objects (stars) and absence of objects (night sky), have the same “feel” of the glossy paper’s surface. The area of black velvet is no more and no less black than the night sky in the picture, but it has an entirely different “feel.” It is not nothing, but no-thing—the no-thing beyond the usual dichotomy of something and nothing. Or, as our second (Christian) excerpt earlier put it, these depths “are neither here nor there”; they transcend duality.

Beyond the mere fact of this no-thing’s existence, it appears to have only a very, very few attributes that I and other contemplatives have been able to detect. One is that the no-thing somehow gives the impression of immense vastness. Another is that it seems intensely alive; this is the source, I believe, of the recurring references to “dark light” in the literature.

Next, the no-thing somehow imparts a sense of peace to those who come near it in prayer, a sense that being with this Presence is good and right somehow. I use the word “sense” here because I do not want to suggest that this peace is an emotion. Instead, one is given a kind of foretaste of the still calmness, the true rest that becomes possible beyond “feeling good” and “feeling bad.”

And finally, the no-thing very gently draws the practitioner closer to it. So subtle and soft is this attraction (most of the time) that the slightest distraction can defeat it; in other words, one has to actively cooperate in letting oneself be drawn closer. Jew and Christians would say that one has to “be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). But even a religion like Buddhism, which does not posit a divine intelligence behind the gently beckoning no-thing, is fully aware of its somehow magnetic quality, as we saw in the excerpt above. Theistic religions can more easily make the obvious metaphorical leap and call the no-thing “Love.”

(Immense, alive, imparting a sense of secure calmness, and loving—the next metaphorical leap is also obvious. In some sense, the no-thing can be said to be like a father, even an Abba! Here we leave the realm of observation, however, and engage in interpretation, where personal and cultural preconceptions are likely to be especially hazardous.)

All of the above can be learned through the regular practice of what Christians call contemplative prayer, without undergoing mystical union. Before February 19, 2003, I strongly suspected that there were no further steps on the contemplative ladder beyond visiting the nothing three times a day in prayer. Simply soaking in the “dark light’s” metaphorical rays would gradually convey more and more of its wonderful, peaceful stillness to my soul—so I believed.

I was wrong, of course. It is possible not only to observe the no-thing from the outside, as it were, with increasing clarity and at greater length; but it is also possible to be “sucked into” and actually enter the Abyss, as I wrote somewhat inelegantly in my earlier description. While this event changed me and my life in many ways, what matters for the purposes of this essay is that this union was not an experience of a mental object (or state) by a subject (me).

I think it may be possible to argue that a contemplative’s awareness during prayer of a certain “area” of no-thing within a larger field of consciousness (which includes mental objects like self-chatter, or mental states like a feeling of bliss, etc.) may still constitute an experience of some thing—something subject to Kantian mediation. As a practitioner of contemplation, I am fully convinced such a view would be incorrect, but it is arguable. What cannot be argued is that union is a state (that is, a mental “object”) within a larger field of mediating and mediable consciousness.

Union is, precisely, the temporary disappearance of all the usual processes of consciousness—the awareness of nothing except no-thing. For this reason, mystics universally describe union as the death (or even annihilation) of the self: “’Ben Azzai looked and died’ [when he] gazed at the radiance of the Shekhinah,” we read earlier. Awareness continues, as the great contemplatives and even I can confirm. But there is not even nothing to be aware of, only the no-thing beyond something and nothing.

With the total evaporation of any object being experienced, the subject doing the experiencing also disappears. That is union. Both terms of the equation vanish, leaving only the equal sign in the middle: an awareness of an infinite Abyss of Love.

Now, I realize very well that almost all readers of this essay have not been where I was taken on February 19, 2003, and thus for now you must accept on faith this report on my “field experiment” with mystical union. I will return to that problem in a moment. At this point, however, I think we should note that if my report above is accurate, then mystical union is not a mediated experience, and the perennial theory of mystical union is true. Thus Christian unio mystica, Muslim fana’, Jewish devekut and quite probably Zen Buddhist satori all refer to the same one spiritual Reality. When it comes to religion, we may not agree on anything, but we can certainly agree on no-thing!

To say that mystical union is perennial is not to say that all religions are equal, of course. For my part, I am convinced that Catholicism offers a clearer view of the no-thing than, say, Judaism; but as a former Buddhist, I recognize the unique beauty of a different approach to the “dark light” within. It is also worth recalling that each of these world religions has many, many facets beyond personal mysticism, and differences in those areas neither can nor should be downplayed. If more Christians were to focus on unio mystica and more Muslims were to seek fana’, however, we would inevitably discover that we cannot remain true to the one no-thing and go on killing each other over divergent doctrines and disagreements on ritual.

This essay’s hypothesis on the universality of mystical union cries out for confirmation, of course, so I will now propose two possible avenues for developing further “evidence.” Both are somewhat whimsical and impractical, in keeping with the whole tenor of this essay, perhaps. But if we must go tilting at windmills, we may as well do it on an improbable old nag like Rosinante!

First of all, a serious effort should be made to interview contemplatives from all faiths on the specific question of the perenniality of union, in view of their own and other religions’ written descriptions of the phenomenon. We need the input of insiders, as it were. I find it interesting and suggestive, for instance, that Thomas Merton “in his earliest writings had said some very harsh things about non-Christian ways of prayer and meditation”17 but toward the end of his life wrote a Sufi scholar that “[m]y prayer tends very much to what you call fana.”18 Certainly when I myself read Christian, Sufi, Jewish and Buddhist descriptions of mystical union, I often experience a strong sense of intimacy with those long-dead writers, as if I were reminiscing with a comrade-in-arms who had fought on the same jungle battlefield with me in our youths. Of course that may be no more than a case of projection on my part; but if many currently practicing contemplatives report

the same “aha! at last!” reaction across centuries and cultures, then perhaps we are on to something here.

Secondly, it would seem helpful if more scholars of mystical union were to actually practice contemplation—if they were to encounter the spiritual Reality of which the texts speak so inadequately. Of course the idea of embarking on a discipline of contemplative prayer may seem a little threatening to minds that are more used to grappling with language than sinking into the wordless silence, but words alone simply will not do, in this particular field at least. Fortunately, there are many excellent modern books of instruction on Centering Prayer and the like.

Here I can offer some personal encouragement to doubters: if I can make progress on this path, then anyone can! I am a college drop-out, a prisoner with a menial, ill-paying job and no hope of advancement in this world. My (adult) life so far has been marked by poverty, danger and suffering; and frankly, it is likely to get worse. I am, quite literally, nobody! Yet God allowed me into his presence—a gift that was definitely worth a seventeen-year wait—so why not you too?

Having you develop some first-hand acquaintance with the no-thing is necessary because I am in no position to do the research and writing required to persuade the academic community that the perennial theory of mystical union is true. My station in life prevents me from tilling those particular fields; again, I am nobody. But the matter at hand is really too important to let drop, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay.

Like it or not, we are in a religious war, and given the nature of that particular beast, the fighting will only get hotter over time. Ask yourself, the next time you purchase an airline ticket, whether the great clash between cross and crescent does not have a direct negative impact on your own life. And then ask yourself if you can really afford to stand aside and do nothing.

Not all of us need become contemplatives in order to make unio mystica/fana’/devekut a practical basis for peace. But a wider awareness of this phenomenon among the elites of both sides may in time reach a kind of “critical mass” where our leaders find it more politic to stop sending jihadists and G.I.’s into battle.

Is all of this a pipe dream? Maybe. But Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all founded by dreamers who left the safety of home for greater things: Abraham went out from Ur, Jesus from Nazareth, and Mohammed from Mecca. All three spent time in the desert before reaching their goals; and it is surely no coincidence that “the desert” became one of the most common metaphors for contemplative prayer in the mystical literature of all three religions. So perhaps in this age we are once again being called to follow in the footsteps of our faiths’ founders and enter the inner desert of prayer.

Mystics of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your self... ...and you have no-thing to gain.

Notes
16. Söring, The Way; idem, “Damascus Road,” This Rock, February 2003 (El Cajon, CA); idem, “From Buddhist to Papist,” Pastoral Life, March 2003 (Canfield, OH).
17. Dupré, Light from Light.
18. William H. Shannon, ed., The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985).

Bulletin 72 • Index