Just so you know, these words will be neither anti-mystic nor anti-mysticism. I am a mystic myself. But everyone makes mistakes and mystics are no exception. Because I consider this mistake to be so fundamental, so pervasive and so consequential to the field of transcendental wisdom I have given it this cutesy name, the “Myth of the Mystics.” The falsehood I refer to may not often be stated explicitly, but it is frequently implied and, I believe, always assumed. The myth is that as a result of meditation or other practices you will experience something that you have not experienced before, being something that people do not normally experience. But I am NOT denying that meditation and other practices produce some very powerful and unusual experiences. Confused? To understand requires only that you are willing to make a distinction between experience and the “object” of experience; between the event of receiving experience and whatever it is that is experienced. Being distinct from their object, experiences may have characteristics of their own. Additional experiences of the same object may have profoundly different characteristics.

For example, one of the “promises” of such practices is that you will have an experience of your spiritual nature, of your soul. What I propose is that everyone experiences their spiritual nature, even the most committed atheist, and not even on occasion, but every moment of every day. Mystics of many persuasions have been known to make the statement that people usually think that they are their bodies. But people know themselves as souls much better than they know themselves as bodies. We are constantly embarrassed and consternated and surprised to discover our animal nature. We know ourselves as “persons,” we just always thought that a person had this shape, you know, the one with the arms, the legs, the head, etc. When someone dies we do not simply grieve, but are utterly shocked, and once again consternated. Our experience tells us that a person is not something that will come to an end. But the body lying in that box is no person.

What mystics do is to make high quality observations of things that are already a part of experience. Consider the following: You are driving down a city street. There are trees and houses and people all around you. These things are all part of your experience. But you are not observing, focusing attention upon, all of these things. You had better be observing the road in front of you! If not, you and the people and the houses and even the trees are in imminent danger. We experience countless different things at any moment, but we only observe a handful of them. It should not be hard to recognize that you cannot achieve a greater understanding of any part of your experience without making some systematic observations.

Truly, I am proposing that the actual objects of mystical experience are all things that everyone experiences, just in a different way. If you are wondering why I think this is so critically important, it is this: The only way you will ever come to know yourself as spirit is by looking INTO your experience. The assumption that you need to CAUSE some fundamentally new category of experience gets you looking outside of your experience. You will never find what you are looking for there. Those who have spent countless hours, or years, trying may know what I am talking about.

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