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Burning Toward Transcendence--Kenneth Rose on SubstackRenewing the Spiritual Life after the Evaporation of Meaning Author: Kenneth Rose
Renewing the Spiritual Life After the Evaporation of Meaning. kenrose51.substack.com Language: en Genres: Religion, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Trusting Mystical Experience
Friday, 28 August, 2026
Revised Transcript Hello from a botanical garden in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I have stopped on a road trip. I’m going to close my eyes for a moment. Wow, the garden has disappeared! Oh my gosh, that whole experience of the botanical garden was temporary. It’s gone! I thought it was so real, but it’s gone. Now, though, when I open my eyes, the beautiful garden is back!This thought experiment suggests that although mystical experiences are usually temporary, what they experiences of is not temporary.In each religious tradition that I’ve been engaged in, there’s always a divide between the experiencers and the theoreticians. The experiencers are Catholic mystical theologians skilled in the degrees of mystical union, Hindu yogis who access deep states of samādhi, and the jhāyins in Buddhism who are expert meditators. In these and other traditions, there’s almost always an opposing group of people who are anti-experiential. Either they haven’t had mystical and yogic experiences or they have had them but they see themselves as having transcended them. This is not a divide in just one tradition, but I’ve noticed it in three or more traditions. One day I’ll write a book about that, but I don’t have time right now.The opponents of mystical experiences see them as lacking in value or significance because they’re temporary. Before addressing the issue of their impermanence, we have to define mystical experience, which is a broad expression. For some people, it’s emotional fervor incited by sitting in a beautiful place like this botanical garden, where they feel an upsurge of delight or happiness. For others, it might be a psychedelic experience. And for others it might be a deeply religious, a deeply spiritual intuition. They may have an experience of God, of the divine, of grace, of a brightness or lightness within the heart, or communications with more subtle realms, with God, with angels, with devas. All of this as well as the experiences of mediums and psi phenomena are expressions of our soul, of our deeper selves, the self that is not identical with our conventional everyday self.Most people are not interested in or haven’t heard about or are incapable of doing high level analytical inquiries into being, into Brahman, into emptiness. Nevertheless, there are people who can self-liberate themselves by experiencing the freedom and infinity that lies behind every apparent surface. These people of deeply penetrative intellect are able to self-liberate themselves directly through analytical seeing. They see that everything yields upon analysis to a deeper and subtler level of knowing in which we experience pure freedom and infinity.In the case of those who are truly enlightened, as we find in the Buddhist tradition, this is coupled with omniscience. Freedom, the state of complete openness, or the ground of being, is formless because it’s not containable within a form. This is not just an intellectual knowing, on my part. It’s a direct result of engaging in analytic meditation of the kind in which Madhyamaka Buddhism specializes. You search for that which is abiding and what you find is that all formations dissolve into pure freedom, into emptiness, into Brahman, into śūnyatā, into Gottheit or whatever word you like. This ground of absolute freedom is the standpoint of enlightenment for those who are truly enlightened.There’s a hierarchy of mystical experiences that point to enlightenment. The mystical intuition that sees through forms to formlessness and is then able to turn around and abide in that standpoint is the highest level of mystical intuition. Elevated as it is, it remains a mystical experience. It’s realization. It’s direct seeing. It’s darśana—direct seeing of what ultimately is. It is what the enlightened see. It’s the standpoint from which they write, think, and teach. That is the supreme mystical experience in the hierarchy of mystical experiences. But if I come down from that standpoint to thinking about my toes or being hungry or what kind of a day it is, then it disappears. It’s gone for me, but it’s not gone in itself. It’s only gone because my attention has been averted from it.There are those who say that because mystical experiences are temporary, they have no real value. I might think that this chair in front of me is temporary because it disappears when I close my eyes. But when I open my eyes, it’s there again. The point is that although a mystical experience may be temporary, what it’s an experience of is not temporary. When we have mystical experiences, we should cherish them because they are signposts and signs of hope in our secular age in which materialists and physicalists see mystical experiences as mere products of the brain. In contrast, I would point out that mystical experiences, from the simplest to the most exalted, are evidence of our spiritual nature. Getting caught up in them and reifying them is a mistake, and monetizing them and building a religious or spiritual empire around them can be a path to personal self-destruction. All of the great spiritual teachers knew this, but the greatest spiritual teachers were also deeply illumined people who saw and lived from ultimate reality and in whom mystical experience had reached its culmination in continuous and perfect seeing and being in what ultimately is.The point that I want to reinforce is that while mystical experiences as subjective personal experiences are temporary, what they’re experiences of is not temporary. The standpoint of ultimate reality is not temporary, although our experience of it may be. The mystical intuition that there is a divine presence in my life that is benevolent and loving and that sometimes guides me is a valuable experience. If I turn my attention away from it and go back to a way of life that doesn’t cherish that experience, the experience of it becomes temporary. It goes away, but grace and divine love are not temporary, even if our experience of them is.For many people, an experience like this is the most extraordinary event that they have experienced in their lives. To systematically undermine that as materialists, physicalists, and dry, ascetical spiritual practitioners do is to undermine people’s spiritual life. It does them harm not to recognize that these valuable experiences are signposts toward and doorways into a different way of experiencing our lives, into becoming one with the divine, into awakening to truth, and to becoming enlightened.Many people who set out on the spiritual path want the ultimate teaching immediately. They don’t want to bother with the preliminaries or they’re impatient to get through them because they want the ultimate teaching now. Someone hears about Tibetan Buddhism and they immediately want to practice Dzogchen. A person becomes a Catholic and they start reading mystics and immediately they want to take the apophatic path of St. John of the Cross or Dionysius the Areopagite. They seek to avoid the graded path, which starts in the Catholic tradition with meditation, or meditatio. It proceeds through affective states such as the different stages of mystical union until, finally, we come to the transfigured life in which we live as the divine from the divine standpoint, with or without emotional exaltation. It’s the same in Hinduism and Buddhism—which i have more carefully detailed in my books.In our personal spiritual life, mystical experiences are what brought most of us onto the path. Not many of us came onto the path because we read a book and we thought it sounded interesting. No, we had a moment of insight, clarity, or awakening—all of which are mystical experiences. They’re temporary for people who have them until the final insight that fully awakens you becomes permanent.So, on this beautiful morning, I’m going to close my eyes again as I end this talk. Even though my eyes are closed and the experience of this botanical garden is not happening right now for me, I can assure you that this botanical garden is still here.If you liked this post, consider sharing it.If you haven’t already subscribed, you can here:More of my writing in written and spoken form is available on Amazon This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kenrose51.substack.com
