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Land of Nowhere

It has often been said that mysticism as a mode of

being is lost to us, that the great age of medieval

mystics did not survive the birth of humanism or the

Reformation, or indeed the Age of Enlightenment. This is

true if one regards the mystical life as belonging solely

to the cloister or hermit’s cave. But is it true if one

regards it as not belonging solely in the preserve of

Christian belief at all – that, as a discipline and way

of thinking, it remains independent of orthodox piety as

a spiritual discipline in its own right?

This is what I wish to explore with you, dear reader,

as someone who may be yearning for the return of a

spiritual sensibility considered to lie in the past. In

an age dominated by science and the secular, is it

possible to live a mystical life, one might ask? Have we,

in fact, discarded a way of being for the sake of living

a more cosseted existence? Some might argue that this to

be so: that the mystical mind has been in a state of

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repose for too long ever to be resuscitated. It has

become part of an archeology of the spirit, there to be

unearthed and examined as one might an ancient artifact,

before being placed beside shards of pottery or arrow-

heads in a museum cabinet.

Mysticism, of course, means different things to

different people. It has always been hard to pin down as

a concept, precisely because it refuses to be

categorized. For many people, particularly today, the

idea of someone being ‘mystical’ is to suggest an

otherworldly disposition, or simply a penchant for

appearing to be vague and somehow lost in his or her own

world. Certainly the term infers a desire to dispense

with everyday reality in favor of some ill-defined

behavior more in keeping with a condition of fayness.

Such a person is able to conduct himself, and determine

his thought processes, outside the normal rational

environment in which others live; he or she is forgiven

for acting in a way that often seems illogical and

unpredictable, once their mystical nature is acknowledged

and understood.

Of course, this view is the popular perception of the

mystic. He or she has chosen to retreat from everyday

reality in a bid to retain a measure of freedom from

conformity or the straightjacket of social systems. That

a person wants to, in a sense, ‘float’ above himself in

order to observe what makes him a constrained yet

independent entity. Mysticism then becomes an escape from

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the real, the ordinary, and the contingent. The popular

idea of being a mystic accords a person the chance to

release him or herself from the prison of objectivity and

of logical behavior. Popular mysticism as such enables a

person to retire into a state of subjectivity where

thought and daydreaming becomes the primary condition of

existence.

The word needs to be unraveled. The etymological root

lies in ancient Greek. There it means something specific.

Mystes alludes to the idea of closure, to the closing of

the lips or eyes, the primary sense of which is to remain

silent. It is also meant as a noun. A man can be a mystes

when he has been initiated into certain mysteries. These

mysteries may be associated with cult activity, such as

the Eleusian mysteries in Greece and Asia Minor. A mystes

is therefore someone who is prepared not to talk about

his knowledge of the revelations that he has received at

the behest of those initiated members of his lodge or

fraternity. He adopts a position of silence in relation

to the world at large.

For most of us, this is an unusual position to take. We

are not accustomed to silence as a mode of practice. In

an age where the use of words is a sign of presence and

of actuality, the very idea of closure, of not opening

one’s lips, is strangely antithetical to our nature. We

want to talk, we want to express what we feel or think.

We are half of a mind to believe that loudness insures

that we are not easily dismissed. Thoughts clearly stated

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becomes a badge of identity, an assurance of our place in

the world. Silence tends to negate that position. A

silent person is someone in whose company we feel

uncomfortable. We feel that he is observing us. He is not

listening to us. He is measuring his presence against our

own.

Silence, then, which is the hallmark of a mystes or of a

mystic, is the prerequisite of an unintended act of

forbearance. A mystic chooses silence as his camouflage,

even if he is not sure why. He does not wish to be

noticed; he becomes an invisible man. If this is so, then

such men are not apparent to us whenever we go about our

daily business. They are veiled. They inhabit shadows. To

recognize one of them is to be sensitive to their

capacity for unusual gestures, to their allusive way of

talking. In their presence one is always aware that the

words they utter are in some way not the words they wish

to say. Language, for them, has become a burden.

Clearly, they have other thoughts on their mind that

they wish to communicate. But they do not wish to allude

to these through conventional expression. A mystic is

someone who is linguistically exhausted. For him words

are so much like old furniture lying in some dusty corner

of his mind, broken and disused. They have outlived their

time. He has cast them aside as little more than the

detritus of an outworn consciousness, that consciousness

which identifies and determines the world of appearance.

He sees such a world not so much as a shaft of sunlight

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slanting through water, but more as an opaque reference

to pragmatic thought, the thought that makes possible the

conduct of everyday life. He has become inured to such a

way of thinking because his mind has developed another

form of expression.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I want you, dear

reader, to be alert to the importance of a mystic’s

primary asset, that of his silence. It is a particular

condition. A man who is silent is a man who prefers the

absence of words from his life. He sees muteness as his

formal posture. Of course he ‘talks’ normally when he is

among normal people, but inwardly he is silent. He hears

his own emptiness. He senses the profound vacuity of his

thoughts. What he is hearing is the sound of voices from

within whose utterance is unapologetically nonsensical,

the sound of sufferance. Sufferance, you might ask? What

can sufferance possibly have to do with the mystical

life? It is a question we will address again and again as

we pursue our journey together. Sufferance and silence

accompany the mystic throughout his life. They are the

horses bearing the chariot of his being, even as he

believes he is able to manage their traces in spite of

their tendency to bolt.

But first we must engage in why it is that mystics, as

distinct from pragmatists or realists, actually exist.

The latter might consider the former as an interloper in

the domain of being because they are not ‘all there’,

that they inhabit a place which does not exist. This is

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precisely so, even if the pragmatist and the realist want

to deny placelessness as an existential condition. How

can one inhabit a no-place? How can one enter a place

that does not exist, and there construct a world that

transcends the idea of formal substance, or indeed the

regionality of place itself? Is it possible to live

outside the simple categories of geography or atomic

weights, or indeed the airiness of gases as they float in

space?

The simple answer to these questions is to acknowledge

that the idea of a land of Nowhere has been expressed by

a particular word in old Persian. Na-koja (‘nowhere’) Abad

(‘land of’) suggests an affiliation with the concept of

utopia in a European context, but it is not so. Unlike

utopia, which is an abstract noun coined by Thomas More

to designate the absence of any localization or specific

site in space, Na-kotja-Abad aligns itself with the concept

of unextended being existing in a dimensionless state

that is beyond sensible perception. Its topos, if you

like, is defined less by ‘where’ or ‘where does it lie?’

than by a sense of ‘beyondness’ that encapsulates

external or natural appearances which determine our

everyday perceptions, in the same way as an almond is

contained by its shell. It is a world, according to Ibn

Bajja, a Moorish philosopher of the twelfth century,

known as the ‘region of the solitary.’

Now this is a perfect place for a mystic to exist. It

answers many of our questions as to why he or she is

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content to live outside the security of topos. A mystic,

by his or her very nature, has abandoned the security of

the spatial in favor or a more ‘vertical’ or elevated

existence. Again, what kind of existence is this? How can

one live vertically? Is such a state not an attempt to

call into question the nature of gravity when it is

applied to the human condition? After all, we are

grounded; we do not inhabit the realm of birds or the

stratosphere. If the mystical life is about attending to

a preoccupation with the vertical, how does that

formulate itself in our everyday life?

It is a question that has long troubled commentators

attempting to understand what mysticism actually means.

As soon as one dispenses with the priorities of

appearance and the actuality of what one sees, then the

business of describing a no-place or a verticality

becomes increasingly difficult. These terms imply a

negation of objective experience, and possess no

spatiality in themselves. They seem to undermine all

empirical evidence about what constitutes the world,

existence, the formulations of matter, even life itself.

They place us on a collision course with reality as we

know it. In the end we become, so to speak, lost in

words. Our ability to determine what we see with the aid

of language is called into question. This is the

beginning of the journey.

Quite naturally, we prefer to draw back from such a

descent that seems to lead into a vortex of unstable

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terms and images. We prefer to remain on the riverbank

rather than to test ourselves by fording the rapids. No

one likes to lose his footing or abandon the security of

facts. But this is precisely what a mystic tends to do.

He prefers to set sail on a sea of diminished meaning in

order to reach some isolated yet pristine shore. He knows

that facts offer only a restricted access to the

spiritual knowledge that he wishes to discover. The

faculties required to break with the patterns of received

information are those that he wishes to renew. Discursive

reasoning gives way to what the Greeks called noesis, or

intuitive apprehension of different levels of reality.

The lust to know is not his ambition. In fact, the

opposite is true. A mystic is peculiarly untouched by

knowledge. Somehow he manages to operate within a vacuum

of established facts. It is not because he despises them,

or wishes to remain ignorant himself, but that he

recognizes their limitation. He regards facts and the

knowledge that underpins them as a cover for the

insecurity of rationalism. Rationalism’s supreme

arrogance is founded upon a belief that what is known

empirically constitutes an actual truth. A man who spurns

this hypothesis (for it is a hypothesis) must in turn

resort to silence, because he knows that language has

failed its first test, that of determining truth itself.

This is why a mystic is a silent man. He is a stranger in

the midst of a maelstrom of facts masquerading as

information. He has learnt to lie low.

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We are now in a region of contention, the battleground

between what we know and what our inner being experiences

independently of conventional data associated with facts.

The mystic is like a sea-anemone in this respect: his

sensibilities withdraw immediately when he encounters the

danger of too much knowledge. It is no accident, for

example, that Saint Francis of Assisi urged his followers

not to read and acquire too much knowledge. He did not

mean that he wanted his acolytes to remain ignorant.

Rather, he wanted them to realize that an intrinsic

knowledge of the spirit, which lies outside discursive

reasoning, was more worthy of their attention than the

polemics of dogma. The church, he knew, was a purveyor of

spiritual facts, rules and regulations, and not the

plenitude of spiritual insights.

A mystic projects his depth, his unfathomable nature, to

the outside world, whether he hopes to conceal it or not.

It is his image of himself, and is a part of his aura.

What he sees inside himself is a plenum of unparalleled

insights. This makes him different to other people. It

makes him exceptional, too, in a way that we who are not

mystical find difficult to understand. He lives, in a

sense, outside the totality of human experience projected

as human experience. By this I mean that a mystic shares

his humanity with us, but remains ever vigilant to the

risk of being consumed by it. The give and take of normal

reality is forever tugging at his being, hoping for him

to remain consistent with our understanding of the fixity

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of existence. He is like a rope climber clambering into

the sky before the rope crumbles under his weight. We are

the watchers, anticipating his collapse.

His inner fire is none other than the substance of

himself breaking through the dome of corporeality. Few

men are able to do this because they are constrained by

their adherence to the pragmatism of everyday reality. A

mystic is a man who has found a way to shatter the

outward conformity of his being in his bid to shape an

incorporeal existence for himself. It sounds strange, to

live incorporeally; but if one seriously thinks about the

concept, one is seduced by its possibility. We know that

it is possible because we have witnessed men and women

who did just that. The great avatars such as Christ,

Mohammed, and Buddha have earlier shown us the way. They,

even as they were humans not avatars, lived incorporeal

lives.

So the mystic plays with fire. Not the fire in the

grate, but the inner fire of his own self-immolation.

There are about him the qualities of the phoenix. His

self-consummation is mysteriously adjudicated by a desire

to spread warmth throughout his being. Such a warmth is

produced by the cinders of his own annihilation. Inwardly

he burns. A mystic is one who lives a pyrotechnical life.

Whether he likes it or not, he finds himself setting fire

to himself.

Images, you say? I am toying with metaphors? Of course.

For all his silence in the wake of our noise, a mystic

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inhabits a metaphorical tower. He lives among a plethora

of images. His whole being is infested with them. He

cannot escape their powerful effect upon him as a

repository of suspended images. Suspended images? What on

earth are we talking about? One can only compare a

mystic’s inner life to that of a mirror. Subtle images

are reflected in that mirror in a way that they are

‘caught’ but not substantiated as physically real. They

become suspended in a reality, which is a kind of

immaterial tableau, that exists as part of a mystic’s

painfully acquired sensibility.

The mirror that is himself sustains these images,

knowing that they constitute an immutable substance. By

this I mean a realm of pure spiritual light. They cannot

be ‘erased’, except by some deliberate act of inner

decimation. A genuine mystic protects his mirror as he

would a treasure-chest of suspended images, images that

clothe his being in a translucent garment. He is no

longer at the mercy of apparitions as he is of the

tenuous nature of those images that make up the language

of mystical expression. They tease him with their

provenance. He knows that they come from ‘elsewhere’,

from the realm of no-place. Yet equally, he knows that

even as images in suspension they are dominated by a

density that can never be discarded. He knows also that

their virtual existence can only be an alternative

periodic table to that which reflects our chemical or

elemental reality.

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We are now in the realm of projective poetry. Such a

poetry emerges from the absolute freedom of metaphor that

a mystic has been able to erect in his being. I say

‘being’ rather than ‘mind’, because the latter suggests a

deliberate attempt at intellectual or emotional fusion. A

mystic does not think in images. They project themselves

upon his inner being in the form of a subtle equation of

metaphors. He lives in and through metaphors. They do not

impose themselves upon him. They erupt into his being,

unbidden and undemanded, simply because he has prepared a

sanctuary for them. He has become a metaphoric being,

able to juggle images that possess an immutable spiritual

density of their own.

It is important to understand a mystic’s reliance on

the language of metaphor in order to chart his progress.

He knows that he is unable to resort to normal expression

because it is more or less fixed. Nor can he rely on the

usual dialectic of the intellect to explain what has now

become a dialectic of the spirit. For him, the latter has

become a real flower blooming in the innermost reaches of his

being. Such a flower ancient mystical thinkers such as

Proclus regarded as that part of one’s intellect which

helps us to go beyond being itself. A mystic, therefore,

goes within himself to observe it, to cultivate it, and

to watch it as it goes through the motions of an

unfolding beauty. Or should I say emotions? Projective

poetry is about finding a language that conveys a

delightful discordance, the discordance that come about

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when movement (motion) is juxtaposed against the

unplumbed depths of feeling itself.

This is how metaphor works for the mystic. He is

constantly at the mercy of ellipsis, of words at play in his

mind. He has no problem suggesting that snow might be

black, for example, knowing that water, before it is

crystalized, has the appearance of being black, or at

least colorless, when it is set against the dark bed of a

clear stream. Its crystallization makes it white,

however. For a mystic, such an observation is a perfect

example of how words might suggest a playfulness in the

way they convey transformative processes. Black water

becomes white snow! Appearance is thus constantly

undergoing transformation. The world as we know it is

ever at the mercy of the mobility of the image. Nothing

is fixed.

Change is at the heart of a mystic’s engagement with

reality. Therefore words cannot be assured of their

integrity in the wake of such change. But metaphors can

because they embrace change as a prefigurement of some

elliptical purity. It is this purity that a mystic

embraces. He ventures into the mystery of black snow as a

metaphor for his own crystallization. He has found an

unlikely image to express the elemental gradations of being

that he is beginning to realize in himself. Such images

are not arbitrary signs as we might believe them to be,

but ontological traces of the divine, inseparable as they

are from the entire body of manifestation. For a mystic,

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the entire cosmos is a shrine or statue in a temple,

itself a symbol of the noetic realm of the Creator.

Mystic intuitively understand their place in such a

transcendent cosmos. In it they partake of a reality that

has no precedent other than that which they create within

themselves. They begin to prepare in themselves what

Henry More called a spissitudo spiritualis or spiritual

condensation. It designates an unlikely fourth dimension

where matter and space as metaphysical realities begin to

intersect. Sadruddin Shirazi, a Persian thinker and

mystic, spoke of this spiritual matter as being of a

suprasensory origin, imperceptible to the senses, but

nonetheless perceptible in the world beyond.* Nor is it made up of

the opaque matter which lies within the domain of

ordinary perceptible experience. According to John of

Roosbroec, a fourteenth century Flemish mystic who we

will meet later in these pages, a man can only experience

such a ‘raptus’ or condensation, none other than this

spiritual fourth dimension, when he is snatched away or

taken over by some power generated within himself.

A mystic’s life is therefore committed to the practice

of accumulating silent things within. These ‘things’

*

? Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī, (1572–1640), was the most prominentIranian Shia Islamic philosopher and theologian of his time. He isarguably the single most important and influential philosopher in theMuslim world in the last four hundred years. Though not its founder,he is considered the master of the Illuminist school of philosophy,and a seminal figure who synthesized the many tracts of the IslamicGolden Age philosophies into what he called the TranscendentTheosophy or al-hikmah al-muta’liyah.

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reverberate within his metaphoric being. They take on the

form of suspended images, as seen in a mirror, and become

a reflection for other meanings. He becomes surrounded by

the fluidity of discordant meanings. It is for this

reason alone that he abandons the fixed dialectic of

meaning-filled expression, the world-alphabet as Hermann

Keyserling called it. It is not that he wishes to escape

the world of the known, not at all. He simply wishes to

place himself in the path of a more flexible dispensation

aligned to a language that suggests, for example, the way

a stream might teach him how to speak. It might, in turn,

alert him to the existence of a beautiful round word that

is a stone. A stone as a verbal pattern of being-in-the-

world.

The journey that we are about to take in order to

understand the mystical life is one that asks of us to

put aside our carefully acquired perceptions of reality.

That reality is a given as far as a mystic is concerned.

His or her interest lies elsewhere, in seeing things that

are imperceptible to the eye, yet present through the use

of a visionary eye. Such an eye was well understood by

seers and shamans of the past; in fact, they relied on it

to fulfill their role as soothsayers and prophets. To

accuse these people of being mountebanks and deceivers is

to diminish the value of what they did, and how they

thought. Their task was to look beyond everyday reality,

and to explore a mystical intensity, in their attempt to

present an alternate view of reality. This perspective

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was a visionary one. It thrived on a superlative view of

the inner world.

The mystical life offers a way into that inner world.

It is a rigorous, often ascetical endeavor. Men embark

upon it because they have grown tired of the slow

depredation of the here and now on their inner selves.

They want more, much more. Even as they enter such a life

they begin to recognize a succession of new possibilities

opening up to them, much as one might see shifting images

in a kaleidoscope. Then they ask themselves: what do I

want from my life? After discarding all the accouterments

of normal, everyday existence – family, possessions,

status, career, awards and honours, for example – they

are confronted with a new question: what next? What can

life offer if it is not these? The mystical life embodies

such a question. For the neophyte, the question becomes a

riddle, like that of a Japanese koan.

There are people, however, who throughout the ages have

made a commitment to living a mystical life. Many of them

were barely literate; others, more sophisticated in their

attributes. The mystical life, it seems, in part choses

those whom it wishes to inhabit. One is called, in a

sense. But one thing is certain: such a life transcends

the suppositions of man as man, and asks him to see

himself as a spiritual being first. A noted modern poet,

Edmond Jabes, posed the question that any mystic might

ask of himself: ‘Did I die before my life, or was I born

after my death? The answer, of course, is simple: life

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knows no duration. Nothing endures other than in death.

Time is negated by death.

The mystical life is not for everyone. It is a life

dedicated to anchoresis, to withdrawal, as the ascetics of

the desert would say. Withdrawing from life, however, is

not a physical act but one of inward-turning, of metanoia.

To make such a turning requires a conscious decision on

our part to distance ourselves from causal existence,

surrounded as it is by the here and now. The world of the

senses, so dear to us, is called into question, not

because it is undesirable, but because it presents us

with limitation. A mystic wants to transcend that state even

though he acknowledges it as part of his everyday

reality. He or she wants to live outside limits, and to

flee from multiplicity.

The great mystics of all ages have taken it upon

themselves to live in a state of spiritual vertigo. They

stand on the abyss of themselves and look down into their

depths as they might into a deep well. They need to hold

onto the windlass in order to steady themselves, and stop

themselves from falling into darkness. Vertigo is

dangerous, but it is also exhilarating. The soul is

subject to epectasis - that is, the tension of unitary

growth, a ‘towards’ and ‘out of’ a state of stasis. It is

the one part of ourselves that we rarely believe has a

life, and lives such a life, independently from our

physical selves. The mystic’s task is to cultivate

epectasis, to press himself to take steps to move beyond

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his past, to stand aside from what Gregory of Nyssa calls

our ‘garment of skin.’†

The following pages bring us in contact with certain

mystical thinkers whose surefootedness allowed them to

overcome any occasional bouts of vertigo. All of them

were deeply human, exceptional even in their

unexceptionality. Some of them wrote vividly of their

experiences; others found a way to overcome their

illiteracy in their bid to express their true feelings.

All of them, however, were wedded to the limitations of

language in their quest for the mot just of the inner life.

One fact becomes clear: the life of a mystic is no

ordinary life. It is circumscribed by an expansiveness

that knows no bounds. For the mystic, there is a

strangeness that he experiences when he or she ‘re-

descends’ into normal life after a period of living

outside himself.

Plotinus, one of the greatest of the Alexandrian

mystics of the third century, wrote of his own personal

encounter with ecstasis, a going out of oneself:

Often I reawaken from my body to myself: I come

to be outside other things, and inside myself.

What an extraordinary wonderful beauty I then

see! It is then, above all, that I believe I

† Gregory of Nyssa was a fourth century Orthodox mystic and writer.He is credited with the idea that each stage of spiritual growth isthe development of a reality that is entirely new. ‘The growth of thesoul is being constantly created, and every changing for the betterby its growth in perfection.’

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belong to the greater portion. I then realize

the best form of life; I become at one with the

Divine, and I establish myself in it. Once I

reach this supreme activity, I establish myself

above every other spiritual entity. After this

repose in the Divine, however, when I come back

down from intuition into rational thought, then

I wonder: How is it possible that I should come

down, and how was it ever possible that my soul

had come to be within my body, even though she

is the kind of being that she has just revealed

herself to be, when she appeared as she is in

herself, although she is still within a body?

A mystic asks nothing of us, and yet he asks

everything. He asks us to learn how to receive what is

incontrovertible: that is, the extraordinary grace which

shimmers on the surface of beauty. Only the visionary eye

has the capacity to see such beauty; and a mystic is one

who has developed such an eye to the point where it

discerns the difference between ordinary life and a life

of grace.

Most of us, those of us who do not feel ourselves to be

mystics, find ourselves trapped within our own myth, in

spite of ourselves. Whether that myth is ordinary life

with all its preoccupations, or the socio-political

structures to which we hold dear, or indeed a myth of a

more transcendent order that stays with us and comfort us

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throughout all our vicissitudes, we are, as Plato

remarked forever, ‘entrapped in our own adamant.’ Myth,

nonetheless, is not a human invention, but the divine

dream of existence.‡ It is the role of the mystic and the

metaphysician to determine how myth, in all its

‘falsity’, images truth. A myth is a riddle of something

else which can only be unveiled by those who understand

the value of intuitive reasoning. Mystical thinking,

which is aligned to myth, allows us to give form to the

formless, and to find those elements that constitute the

sacred dimension of the material world. It is that

dimension that we will explore in more detail throughout

the ensuing pages of this book.

‡ Olympiodorus, a sixth-century Alexandrian philosopher, tells usthat a myth is an image of truth, and that the human soul itself isan image of more sublime noetic realities that exist outside ournormal discursive reasoning. A myth is the surface meaning, a‘screen’ for certain metaphysical teachings concealed in the depth ofmyths themselves. Traditional peoples understand how myth workstowards screening, and revealing, what is in essence a mysticalreality. Hence the invisible is to be inferred from the visible, theincorporeal from the bodily.

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