There is a scene in Boaz Yakin’s film A Price Above Rubies wherein a desperate and increasingly disillusioned Hasidic woman is brought into the office of her community’s rebbe or spiritual leader. The holy man, beard whitened with age and wisdom, gently instructs the woman to listen to the dictates of her soul. Perhaps, with time, her problems will dissipate. But she is not satisfied.

“I don’t even know where my body ends and my soul begins.” The words are pronounced as quietly as they are slowly, almost whispered. But in the ears of the rebbe they might as well have been screamed. The old sage is nonplussed. Every Jew has a holy Neshamah, a spark of the god-head within their being. Incorruptible and divine, this deepest level of the soul is not tainted by the body and its impurities. This is common knowledge to all pious Jews, a truth passed down the ages from the most venerable rabbinical authorities. Nobody has ever strolled into his office and delivered such a statement. Perhaps the woman is insane.

The pages which follow challenge the notion of a disembodied soul. Beginning with the legacy of Platonism upon our understanding of the religious self (section two), I go on to provide an alternative understanding of religious ritual and narrative (section three) and a similar account of the religious experience (section four). Along the way I make use of the work of two secular thinkers: James J. Gibson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The position offered is nothing less than a denial that the body ends where the religious self beings; that the soul, whatever it may be, is embodied through and through.

Platonism

“What is this Quintessence of dust?” meditates a brooding and troubled Hamlet on the human being. ¹ This question should be less than shocking to the Biblically informed. Its imagery is, after all, directly indebted to Genesis. The Old Testament understanding of the human animal is that of a creature purely of the soil; one finite, ephemeral, and destined for the grave. When the ancient Jews finally conceived of an afterlife or world to come—a late addition to the Hebrew Bible—it was not of an immaterial essence continuing beyond the pale of death, but the bodily resurrection. Even the early Christians were far from uniform in their departure from this perspective. Paul for instance spoke of those awakened on the Day of Judgment not as disembodied souls but as spiritualized bodies rising from the earth.

But we are taken back by Hamlet’s words, and not just because of their aesthetic beauty. For to be a child of the West is to inherit another picture of human nature: That of an immortal self housed only temporarily within a corruptible form. When Plato, the father of Occidental thought, spoke of the philosopher’s quest as “practicing nothing other than dying and being dead,” he was espousing nothing less than the need to isolate the soul away from the world of the senses.² This is was envisioned by Plato not as a transformation of the human being, but the art of recovering what we already are: Spirits in exile, pilgrims seeking our true home in the ideal, the universal, and the abstract.

In the first century, a Hellenized Jew named Philo of Alexandria dared to reconcile the Pentateuch with Platonism, and the result was a legacy to last two millennia. From Avicenna to Aquinas, the Scholastic tradition is largely a combination of the Abrahamic traditions with the abstractions of the Greeks. This synthesis would leave a permanent mark on how Jews, Christians, and Muslims would conceive both God and humankind. Plato’s doctrines of the soul’s pre-existence as well as its transmigration from body to body may have been abandoned, but his understanding of the disembodied self was duly retained.

Through Plotinus, the creator of Neo-Platonism, much of the mysticism of the West became the story of the soul purging itself of all worldly accretions and merging into an equally simple and immutable Absolute. This portrait of the spiritual life would inform the ecstatic flights of Islamic Sufis and Christian Contemplatives alike. A key Sufi term for instance is Dhikr or “to remember.” This is the Islamic equivalent of Plato’s concept of anamnesis: Knowledge as recollection. Hence, mysticism is conceived not as a journey of the soul to a foreign realm, but the reconciliation of like to like—or as Plotinus states at the very end of the Enneads, the flight of “solitary to solitary.” ³

Those ill-at-ease with the concept of immortality, let alone the lofty heights of mysticism, are the inheritors of Platonism in yet another fashion. It is taken for granted that the philosophical and religious life, as opposed to the preoccupations of the business person and the bricklayer, are marked by an increased and self-conscious interiority. Profundity is inward, and spirituality is concerned with the deeper, less shallow and more real center of the psyche.

We are heir to Platonism by way of Augustine’s “inner man,” an understanding which continues through the modern world in Descartes’ cogito. Here, the human being is fundamentally a thinking self, a private island of consciousness only indirectly related to its own body- let alone to an external world. When the descriptive method of phenomenology was first born in the twentieth century—the disciple which seeks to articulate the structures of experience in disregard to all metaphysical assumptions—it was considered a Cartesian science. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, was fond of making reference to Augustine. Of course, the “existential turn” in phenomenology would join other movements in taking an entirely different direction—a subject to which I will return later.

Descartes’ concept of the Cogito is inseparable from his notion of Res Extensa or “extended thing.” It is in Cartesianism that the Platonic idealization of the invisible and the abstract along with the de-spiritualization of the natural world reaches its culmination. Our prevalent understanding of the physical as lifeless and bereft of any inherent significance—except for what it affords human instrumental needs- has been labeled by Whitehead the myth of “vacuous actuality.”⁴ Materialism in this sense is the flip-side of Platonism, and the extent of its influence upon the modern world has been incalculable.

A recent example of the impact of Platonism on religious studies is one of the “new atheists,” Sam Harris. Harris’s anti-religion polemic, titled The End of Faith, is a stinging critique of the Abrahamic traditions. The Bible, according to Harris, “was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.”⁵ Harris’s full argument is a topic outside the scope of this essay; what is of interest here is his championing of the religious experience.

A professional neuroscientist, Harris argues that the forms of self-transcendence encouraged by Eastern mystics can be useful for gaining a more profound understanding of consciousness. Both self and world, he argues, are ultimately constructs of our brain and sense organs, and that a true science of the mind can learn from the meditative insights espoused by Asian religious philosophers. Harris states:

The claims of mystics are neurologically quite astute. No human being has ever experienced an objective world, or even a world at all. You are, at this moment, having a visionary experience. The world that you see and hear is nothing more than a modification of your consciousness, the physical status of which remains a mystery.⁶

Harris suggests that since everything in our experience is a product of our nervous system, neuroscience can vindicate the claim of Buddhist and Hindu thinkers to have overcome the sense of abiding ego or self. Hence, the non-dualistic awareness spoken of by figures such as Shankara and Siddartha Gautama (the Buddha) can support a science of the mind, and vice versa.

It might seem that Harris’s biological and scientific approach to spirituality is the exact opposite of the Platonist assumptions I have outlined above. Moreover, his advocating of going beyond the subject/object split evades the Cartesian re-formulation of these themes. On closer inspection however, neither is the case. For Harris, since the distinction between self and other is a construct of the nervous system, the transcendence of this division is also a neurological phenomenon. The result is an understanding of the religious experience as a strictly inward process; a state of consciousness achieved without reference to the rest of the human body, the environment, and the larger social and cultural world. Thus, while Harris provides a materialistic justification of the spiritual life, his overall vision is Platonic and Cartesian to the core.

It would be instructive to examine how a follower of Sam Harris would appreciate a Chinese landscape painting. Influenced by Buddhism and Taoism, the painter sought to capture the ineffability of the universe when perceived through the enlightened eye. In these portraits, clouds, sky and tree-covered mountains are used to express the notion of tathata or “suchness.” Nature, when seen correctly, becomes transparent to its source in the infinite. This is a highly spiritual sentiment; but more, it is a statement about reality
Not so, according to the follower of Harris. Since spirituality concerns the world created by our minds and nervous systems, the artist was just expressing his inner state of consciousness. This is comparable, perhaps, to taking a tab of LSD. By contrast, the artist did not see his or her work in this way. According to Buddhists and Taoists, what is depicted on canvas is nothing less than a direct perception into the ultimate character of things. Sam Harris cannot do justice to the very traditions he purportedly defends.

Stepping back from Harris, it becomes evident that many promoters of spirituality and religion, from Aldous Huxley’s classic Perennial Philosophy to the even more recent and popularizing works of Karen Armstrong, hold religious experience to be a strictly interior event; a drama which takes place within the hidden recesses and chambers of the mind. Myth, Armstrong assures us, was originally “associated with mysticism, the descent into the psyche by means of structured disciplines of focus and concentration which have been evolved in all cultures as a means of acquiring intuitive insight. Without a cult or mystical practice, the myths of religion would make no sense.”⁷ And true spirituality is understood as equivalent to one brand of mysticism: The overcoming of the ego, and the identification with some transcendental reality or ground of being. While not explicitly Platonic, the limited understanding of the religious experience shared by these authors provides no real means of appreciating the fully corporeal and contextualized character of the spiritual life.

There is a price of such a limited vision. First, it cannot do justice to a wide range and variety of religious experiences. For instance, modern Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas set their spiritual ideals against the goal of self-transcendence. Despite Buber’s famous interpretation of Hasidism, the ego never disappears or merges into God (whom Buber calls “the eternal Thou”), but is only fulfilled in relation to it. Likewise, the world is in no way a product of our minds. In the following selection from I and Thou, Buber writes on the traces of philosophical idealism found in the teachings of the Buddha:

“I proclaim friend,” says the Buddha, “that in this fathom-sized feeling-afflicted ascetic’s body dwell the world and the origin of the world and the annulment of the world and the path that leads to the annulment of the world.”
That is true, but ultimately it is no longer true.
Certainly, the world dwells in me as a notion, just as I dwell in it as a thing. But that does not mean that it is in me, just as I am not in it. The world and I include each other reciprocally. This contradiction for thought, which inheres in the It-relation, is annulled in the You-relation which detaches me from the world in order to relate me to it.⁸

The It-relation, more commonly translated as the I-it mode of existence, is a conceptual and objectifying approach to reality. Here, I know the world or other selves abstractly or instrumentally. By contrast, the You-relation, more commonly translated as I-Thou, is where I am fully present to the world in a personal and existential manner; where I open myself up for genuine encounters and allow myself to be effected in turn. In these suggestive but cryptic passages, Buber interprets the founder of Buddhism as advocating a view of reality as a product of consciousness. But a living relationship to something is not an intellectual one, and certainly does not remain within the boundaries of the subject. To have an authentic conversation with my mother, my concept of her needs to make way for the real flesh and blood human being. Spirit, according to Buber, occurs not within the depths of the soul, but “between man and what he is not.”⁹

For Levinas, the encounter with another human being, the thematic core of his philosophy, occurs only to a full-blooded and individuated self. Ego-transcending mysticism and non-dualistic awareness is conceived by him as forms of “totalization,” the arrogant and pitiless attempt to reduce the entire universe to consciousness.

Our advocates of mysticism will never understand the currently fastest growing religion on Earth. The Mormons are devoted to a God with a physical body (with Jesus as his literal son) and a strong belief in the survival of the whole family after death. “All spirit is matter” explains God to Joseph Smith; “We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.”¹⁰

One of the most glaring inefficiencies of these authors is their inability to understand the eschatological impulse in religion. At the heart of the Abrahamic faiths is the spiritualization of space and time—including the expectation of a future where all injustice is forever vanquished. In stripping history of any religious significance and reducing spirituality to an inner state of mind, our popular defenders of mysticism inadvertently contribute to the final victory of Platonism.

The Spirit is on the Outside

The tea master, legs folded gently on the mat, whisks the tea bowl. Smoke rises slowly between the master and his guests, and not a noise is heard outside the sounds of water coming to a boil. The walls are bare except for a work of calligraphy, a single stroke of an ink-brush. Those attuned to the tea ceremony are aware of each gesture, each movement, each pass of a cup, and each bow. To the novice, the atmosphere is one of complete serenity; to the veteran, indescribably more.

“Where is the Buddha-nature?” we may ask the tea master once the event is complete. “Is it inside of the participants?” It is unlikely the master would say yes. If so, zazen or seated meditation alone would suffice instead of a ceremony so complex it takes well over a decade to master. This is in fact one of the many formless arts of Japan influenced by Zen Buddhism—a medium which does not so much represent the Buddha-nature as invoke it directly. “The ceremony,” explains the author of The Book of Tea, “was an improvised drama whose plot was woven about the tea, the flowers, and the paintings.”¹¹

The calm and stillness of the tea ceremony, the peace experienced in the wide open space of a mosque, the passionate beauty of a Catholic Mass and the ecstatic power of a Hindu temple service are not found within the minds let alone the brains, nervous systems, and sense organs of those who visit or participate in these places. This is not to make the inane and obviously false claim that these sites and rituals would continue to have meaning in the absence of conscious minds—or without human beings replete with brains and nervous systems. It is to say that meaning is not entirely mental or neurological, and certainly not isolatable within these things. This fact is essential for appreciating both the true nature and variety of religious experience and expression. In order to articulate this in greater detail, I need to compare Harris’s approach with one adamantly opposed to the Cartesian and Platonist understanding of the mind-body relationship.

As I type these words, I am sitting up in bed. From here I can see the chair. The seat looks inviting to me. So, lifting myself off my mattress, I walk over and take a seat.

Taking in the whole episode from Harris’s perspective, the physical environment casts patterns of light upon the retina of my eyes. These, in turn, make their way through the nervous system where they are reconstructed entirely, with the help of my mind, into a bedroom, a chair, and the need to move from one to the other. Why consciousness would decide upon these things, as opposed to anything else, is a near mystery. After all, I was not so uncomfortable in bed that I couldn’t function properly. Here, it is worthwhile to allow Harris to speak for himself once more:

The sights and sounds and pulsings that you experience at this moment are like different spectra of light thrown forth by the prism of the brain. We really are such stuff as dreams are made of…
This is not to say that sensory experience offers us no indication of reality at large; it is merely that, as a matter of experience, nothing arises in consciousness that has not first been structured, edited, or amplified by the nervous system. While this gives rise to a few philosophical problems concerning the foundations of our knowledge, it also offers us a remarkable opportunity to deliberately transform the character of our experience.¹²

The “few philosophical problems” mentioned by Harris have plagued the history of ideas since Plato. They involve the chasm standing between the mind and its environment, and the question of how one can match up with the other. For instance: How can I know that an external reality exists? And if I must take for granted that one does exist, how do I know it is similar to the image of it I have in my mind? How can I be assured that the world perceived by me is similar to the one perceived by anyone else? If our minds create our realities, how can different human beings—with different languages, cultures and personalities—cohere upon a common world?

According to Harris, the sense organs provide a minimum of information (atomized bits of light, waves of sound...etc.), and the brain and cognition go on to build an entire world.¹³ But if the mind and nervous system are the true centers of meaning, how can a chair look inviting? The property of “inviting” is something I must have consciously projected onto the chair. But compared to how the experience is actually felt, the whole process, as explained by Harris, is baffling, awkward, and overly intellectual. The bed seemed slightly uncomfortable, and the chair caught my attention. So I moved. Had I not been writing this essay and thinking about the topic of perception, I would never have noticed it.

The ecological psychology of James Gibson approaches the situation quite differently. Simply: The chair appeared more comfortable, so I walked over and took a seat. Now, if an outside observer were to freeze any moment of this activity and dissect what occurs, he or she would see sense organs, a nervous system, and waves of light. Gibson denies none of this. But in the act of noticing the chair, I do not see the patterns of light on my retina, and I cannot see my brain and nervous system. These are necessary conditions for my experience, and they accompany every perception I have. But they are not sufficient conditions. My encounter with the chair is a phenomenon in its own right, and is not reducible to the processes which make it possible.

Ecological psychology studies the dynamic relationship between the organism and the environment. According to this perspective, sense organs do not passively receive stimuli out of which a world needs to be reconstructed. Rather, the senses form a unity in order to wean information already found in their surroundings. I do not collect mental snapshots of the chair, and then after some marvelously quick act of computation, subsume the chair under the category of “comfortable.” Comfort is a quality which, to some extent, is found directly in the chair. To use the language of James Gibson, the chair affords me more comfort than the bed. Affordances are those features of the world directly relevant to the well-being of an organism. Gibson explains in more detail:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.¹⁴

This concept of affordances undercuts both the overly cognitive elements of Platonism as well as the subject/object split of Cartesianism. Had the chair a nail protruding from its seat, it would not afford me comfort; had I possessed the body of an ant, the chair would afford an obstacle rather than a place to sit. Affordances demonstrate that my physical form never remains hidden behind the scenes of my visual field. Rather, my awareness of the body floods and informs the whole experience, drawing out features of the environment that would otherwise lie dormant and unnoticed. This is not to say that organisms with different bodies and sense organs live in different environments. If I was an alien with six arms and infrared eyes, I would still be in the same world: Its just that other features of my environment would stand out and gain relevance.

Gibson teaches us that meaning is the product of the body-world relationship, and not at all a creation of the mind or physiology of the brain (even if both of these things are necessary). But we are not yet in a position to fully appreciate the bodily nature of religious ritual and narrative. For this, the contributions of another thinker are required.

In the previous section, I mentioned the discipline of phenomenology, the art of examining the manifold of experience without metaphysical bias. The transcendentalphenomenology of Edmund Husserl was indeed a Cartesian and even Platonist affair, a retreat into our subjectivity in order to uncover the unchanging components underlying every possible act of perception. Central to Husserl’s method was the infamous “transcendental reduction,” the complex strategy of bracketing out anything relating to the external world (what Husserl labeled “the natural standpoint”). Pure phenomenology meant uncovering these abstract essences at the base of all experience.

Later phenomenologists dropped the Cartesian emphasis. It was discovered that returning to “the things themselves” (what Husserl called the raw phenomena of experience), yields not some transcendental realm free of all reference to a surrounding context- but quite the opposite. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty enacted what is called the “existential” turn in phenomenology, and fashioned an understanding of human existence as inherently embodied and inseparable from the environment. Merleau-Ponty states: “Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only the ‘inner man’, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”¹⁵

One of Merleau-Ponty’s chief concepts is the lived-body. While the empirical body is the actual physical vessel through which we move and breathe, the lived-body permeates our field of perception, and articulates our world into structures of meaning. The similarities with Gibson’s concept of affordances should be more than evident.

Merleau-Ponty was a philosopher, not a scientist; his analysis was less naturalistic than Gibson’s, but far more richly descriptive. For this reason he has other contributions equally relevant to the study of religious expression: First, some keen observations on the true impact of sensory stimulation; and second, a study of the full significance of movement.

One of the most effective sections in The Phenomenology of Perception, is a brief but evocative discussion of color. Employing the work of other researchers, Merleau-Ponty describes the fashion in which green, red, and other colors reverberate through the tissue of experience, directing the subject to specific emotional and even muscular reactions. “Sensations, ‘sensible qualities’ are then far from being reducible to certain indescribable state or quale;” he explains, “they present themselves with a motor physiognomy, and are enveloped in a living significance.”¹⁶

Hence, the lived-body is not merely apparent to us in the manner in which external objects appear useful or hazardous—the inconvenience of a pothole on the highway for instance. It is evident to us through a certain intensity of mood brought about by sound and image. To watch the decadent Roman feast in Fellini’s Satyricon on a black and white television is merely disturbing. But in full color, with the garish purple and reds skillfully chosen by Fellini, it is both a horrifying and intriguing experience. Merleau-Ponty would explain that this is something we feel rather than consciously recognize; that images such as these do not offer themselves to the intellect for dispassionate observation. They invade the senses by stealth, immersing the subject in a wealth of tonality and atmosphere. This is all the more so for religious ritual. From the Passion Plays of medieval Christianity to the somber penance of a Yom Kippur service: Ritual wears its innermost meaning on its sleeve, spirit is communicated through the exterior.

Concerning movement, The Phenomenology of Perception contains some startling passages. It is best to begin with one of them:

When I dream that I am flying or falling, the whole significance of the dream is contained in the flight or the fall, as long as I do not reduce them to their physical appearance in the waking world, and so long as I take them with all their existential implications. The bird which hovers, falls and becomes a handful of ash, does not hover and fall in physical space; it rises and falls with the existential tide running through it, or again it is the pulse of my existence, its systole and diastole.17

In the waking world, the realm of common-sense and the assumptions of Newtonian physics, motion is little more than an instance of cause and effect. But there are occasions of experience where movement is inherently significant, and possesses a thematic logic of its own. This is something skillfully employed by the arts, by the media, and of course, by religion.

Borobudor, a famous temple-monument in Indonesia, is partly a three-dimensional diagram of the cosmos from a Buddhist perspective. It is also a map of human consciousness, and depicts the layers of awareness from vulgar sense-gratification to Nirvana. Walking through Borobudur is therefore a journey simultaneously through the universe as well as the different layers of the psyche. From the bottom to just near the top, the visitor moves through a passageway, one which winds around the building in spirals. Every inch of stone is painstakingly carved: From depictions of crude sexuality and gluttony at the lower levels, through scenes of the Buddha’s life and teachings in the middle, and on to increasingly spiritual images close to the uppermost plane.

Finally, the visitor steps out onto the very top of Borobudur—and is suddenly met with empty air, statues of meditating Buddhas, and wind-chime like structures. The passage from the narrowness of the tunnel to the vastness of open space is not accidental: This is the very movement of consciousness from the constraints of ego-attachment to the spaciousness and freedom of enlightenment. It was not enough for the designers of Borobudur to merely represent the supreme awakening; they needed to simulate an experience of it through space, matter, and motion.

Seen against this light, the stories of the Bible or the Qur’an are compelling not as literal representations of objective truth nor as bare symbolism. Rather, religious narrative is powerful because it draws upon and even carries the visceral character of the religious experience. We are moved to tears by the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and their use of biblical imagery—and not because we understand the meaning of his rhetoric in the abstract. The question of whether or not a sacred future, a time where “the crooked will be made straight,” is literal truth or allegory completely evaporates before the moral urgency and pathos of King’s delivery. His words are used to transform us in the present; to actively transport us to a time of true justice and equality. In short, King’s speeches do not point to this reality, they embody it.

The imagery of mythology, explains Merleau-Ponty, “are not linked to their meaning by a relation of sign to signified, like the one existing between a telephone number and the name of the subscriber; they really contain their meaning, which is not a notional meaning, but a direction of our existence.” The exodus of the Israelites to the Promised Land is the transition from bondage to freedom; Mohammed’s celestial journey from the Dome of the Rock is the raising of the self towards the expansive and the sublime.

There is a reason that medieval scholastics and contemplatives were satisfied with overlooking the lushness of these narratives for a completely rationalized and otherworldly interpretation: An impoverished and objectified approach to religious narrative has been fashioned for an equally impoverished and objectified understanding of human experience.

The Body is on the Inside

In the previous section, I have argued that religious ritual and narrative can be understood only through an embodied and environmentally embedded understanding of the human being. But this is to say nothing concerning the nature of the religious experience. Perhaps, it may be argued, the religious experience entails the transcendence of our bodily and earthbound condition, and that our embodiment is merely a necessary component of its cultural expression.

The claims many mystics make concerning their experiences may seem to lend support to this argument. The moments prior to Satori or full awakening, Zen Buddhists describe the manner in which their body and mind seems to drop away. And if there is a single image most commonly found among contemplatives and ecstatics, it is that of an element disappearing into its source—drops of water into an endless stretch of ocean; sparks into an all-consuming flame. Add to this the still-desert and nakedness of the soul, the dissipation of a concrete and particularized self, the paring away of all complexity into a pristine unity. There must be a reason, after all, why the metaphysics of Neo-Platonism was found so congenial by figures such as Meister Eckhart—the most quoted figure in Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. The very claim that the religious experience requires a body and an environment will seem ludicrous to those informed of the world’s great spiritual traditions. That is, until we are granted a closer look.

At the heart of all religious experiences is a kind of movement. This is not that of a body making its way through a room, but a transfer or exchange of states. This is obviously true of the classic and defining episodes of the Western tradition: Paul falling off his horse to face the risen Christ; a tormented Augustine breaking down before the voice of a child in a garden nearby (“take it and read…”); Luther’s sudden and cathartic resolution in a lonely monastery tower. But it is also true of those states of awareness inculcated through the time-tested methods of spiritual transformation. Such techniques include meditation, the narrowing and sharpening of concentration, the repetition of phrases (mantras), theosophical studies, or a leap of faith.

Consider the following movements: From constriction to liberation (moksha), heaviness to buoyancy (“the peace which surpasseth all understanding”), and darkness to light (gnosis). The first is taken from Hinduism, the second from St. Paul, and the third from Gnosticism- a form of mysticism prevalent in the Greco-Roman world. Each assumes both temporality as well as a medium in which to occur, one that is heterogeneous and divisible into parts. After all: Pure awareness without change or inner complexity cannot even be labeled an experience. The resulting picture would be the Aristotelian God in microcosm: Pure thought thinking only itself. Or, to employ another analogy: A splotch of white paint on a purely white canvass. In both cases, nothing would be discernable.

Now, how can consciousness possess diversity or contrasts without borrowing from the rest of the body and surrounding world? No change is possible for a pure awareness devoid of a surrounding context. An organism made of pure light and floating in a vacuum cannot, in principle, comprehend Meister Eckhart’s or Plotinus’s description of disappearing into a primordial One. If gas clouds in some far-off galaxy were to develop intelligence, they could never understand the evangelical who, though once “lost” is now “found.” Again: The issue is not the expression of these experiences, it is the experiences themselves.

It is true that some mystics affirm just this position, paradoxical as it seems. Seeing the cosmos from the standpoint of God or an Absolute reveals that nothing else has ever existed in the first place. Hence, reality is an unchanging monism, and everything up to its discovery is an illusion. But there is a problem with this radical form of acosmism, this rejection of all finitude whatsoever: Namely the joy of the mystic in attaining precisely this state of awareness. If nothing truly exists but an Absolute, one undifferentiated and without inner complexity, there would be no sense of climax or triumph in achieving it. Obviously, something has occurred, some ripple or activity within the god-head; not least of all, an exchange of ignorance for illumination.

If the materialists are correct and we are not minds but physical brains, the problem does not disappear. A succession of neurons, one firing after another, requires some explanation for eliciting just the right transfer of neural activity. Here as well, there is still a reference to factors outside of the nervous system. It could be the quiet of a Quaker meeting, the graceful rites of a Shinto procession, or the feverish whirling of Sufi dervishes. Hence, the peak experiences of even the most interior brands of mysticism would be impossible for beings without a body or environment of some kind.

Besides the actual movement between states, there is the more obvious fact that opposites already imply one other. It is almost too pedestrian to elaborate on the dialectics involved in mystical experience. That the disembodied assumes the embodied by its very definition is no deep secret to the student of comparative religions. It is a matter of mere logic that simplicity presupposes complexity; unity presupposes duality, and so on.

But the dialectics go beyond this simple and abstract kind. There is a broader, more phenomenological belonging-together of transcendence with the embodied character of religious experience. Just as our religious ideals are informed by our physical and social context, so the meaning-structures of our lived experience are, in turn, ordered and stratified in relationship to these spiritual ideals.

The world-weary flavor of early Buddhism is keenly felt when set against the self-abrogating goal of Nirvana. Likewise, the joyful and world-affirming character of Mahayana Buddhism—the contention that Nirvana and the wheel of existence are just two sides of one coin—appears far more exalting when viewed next to the pessimism and elitism of early Buddhism. And moving to another culture: The redemptive power of the kerygma or “proclamation” is only perfectly understood when placed against the historical and cultural circumstances of early Christianity. To be ignorant of first century Jewry is to be unmoved or even appalled by Jesus’ eschatological pronouncements—that of an immanent end of the world. But things are different when reminded of a grueling Roman occupation and a complacent and hidebound religious leadership. It is only after recalling these factors that visions of a disruption in the scheme of things, an overturning of the old order, take on refreshing significance.

To summarize: There exists a true intimacy between the larger cultural framework on the one hand, and the culmination and fulfillment of experience on the other. The two are aspects abstracted from one seamless fabric, and the student of comparative religions can discern the overall texture from which both factors borrow their shape and reality.

Conclusion

The rebbe in A Price Above Rubies should not have been startled by the woman’s strange comments. Hasidism, though a mystical and ecstatic movement, never fully embraced the Platonic degradation of the physical world. The God of Hasidism is fully immanent, and pervades the world like a pinch of salt through a glass of water—to borrow an image from the Hindu Upanishads. The Body is not a barrier to the sacred; it is its direct expression. The point of Hasidism is to hallow this life, not transcend it; to disclose the infinite through the finite, to discover sparks of divinity within the concrete, the worldly, and the mundane.

Hasidic Judaism is not alone. From the transmutation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ to Buddha’s rejection of asceticism: The refusal to locate the spirit where the body ends is no real rebuke to our collective religious heritage. It is little more than a call for reconstruction, and one based upon sentiments already embodied, as it were, within each tradition.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God; A History of Fundamentalism. (2001). New
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Endnotes.