[MD] Notes on Mysticism

[Matt Kundert]

I've just posted a new, longish sequence of thoughts about mysticism 
on my website:

http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2011/01/notes-on-mysticism-madness-directness.html

It was nearly done before I left for Christmas, and might be my first 
use of Pirsig for his philosophical powers (rather than as a topic of a 
piece, or as a way of bridging the understanding for who I sense to 
be my audience: for example, in the latter sense, I dare say I've 
never used Heidegger for his philosophical powers).

The impetus for the piece was my use of the map analogy during 
discussion with Dave last month.  Two paragraphs are adapted from 
two posts on Dec. 4 and Dec. 6.  The rest tries to illustrate what I've 
learned in the last two months about how to articulate my 
understanding of how the rhetoric of mysticism works.

Here's the introductory two paragraphs

"Notes on Mysticism: Madness, Directness, Tears, and Contingency"

Madness
I would like to add a few notes about the surface of mysticism, which 
is to say the language and discourse that surrounds the mystic 
experience. The rhetoric of mysticism has often dovetailed with the 
rhetoric of madness. “Enthusiasm,” often used in older ages to 
describe the Western mystic, comes from the Greek entheos, which 
means quite literally “full of God,” and is often interpreted as “divine 
madness.”[fn.1] The rhetoric of mysticism also often uses the diction 
of directness, such that our common, conventionally appreciated 
reality is really an appearance behind that which is the real reality 
(think of maya from the Hindu tradition). A direct appreciation of the 
real reality, then, will appear mad or crazy to those still within the 
conventional modes of appreciation. This creates a problem, for we 
use the epithets “insane,” “mad,” or “crazy” to identify exactly those 
who are out of touch with reality. So who is right?

So direct of an antithesis is there between the two that rather than 
go straight at this question, we should perhaps first contemplate 
their agreement: variance with conventions. Reality or madness lies 
beyond conventions—perhaps such a consequential gulf embodied 
in this disjunct is what creates a sometimes thrilling anxiety. Since 
at least Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (though Freud’s 
description of neurosis surely got the ball rolling), Western 
intellectuals have become increasingly aware of how the position of 
an “outsider,” specifically in this case the “crazy person,” is created 
by how we count “insiders”—the conventional canons of inclusion. In 
order to approach the problem of what’s beyond conventions, I 
should like to briefly investigate how we break conventions, and 
thus occlude ourselves.

Matt