For me, mysticism is the doctrine that God and I, and you and I, are all, in an important way, One. Philosophical mysticism is the kind of mysticism that emphasizes the role of thinking, in this Oneness. We’re One through our deepest and most serious kind of thinking. Or through love, which is inseparable from that kind of thinking. So in response to the common assumption that “mysticism” is vague and irrational, philosophical mysticism aims to show how, if we take seriously the thinking and loving that we do every day, they point beyond the usual assumption that God and I, and you and I, are ultimately separate and distinct.

Involving thought and love in this way, my mysticism is obviously a matter not just of “theory” but of experience. For me, it’s an immensely fulfilling experience which I had barely dreamt of, before it came to me. For my first four or five decades, I inhabited what looks (in retrospect) like a spiritual waste land. In The God of Love, Science, and Inner Freedom I’ve described some of the experience—of pain, despair, love, and thought—that brought me from that waste land to my current frequent experiences of ecstasy. “Philosophy” should surely come out of, and enrich, a person’s experience. In recent years, mine certainly has.

How can God and I be One? We can be One if my effort to be myself, is God. Such a God isn’t identical with my physical body or my habitual fears, desires and ideas. God may involve that body and those fears and so forth, but God is called “God” because he/she/it goes beyond (“transcends”) them. So when I say that this God is me, I’m not saying that God is physically present in me or that God has the failings that I have. God goes beyond all of that. But a God who transcends those parts of me can nevertheless be present in me as my capacity for inner freedom, or self-determination: for being, or trying to be, something that goes beyond my physical and habitual aspects. In this way there can be, as the Quakers say, “that of God in everyone,” without this God’s being identical to anything merely physical or externally determined.

How can a person experience this presence of God within her? By observing her desires and thoughts, thus creating a space in which they can be reformulated (or reformulate themselves) to be more fully her own. This observing, and the resulting space, reformulation, “her-own-ness,” and opening up to the world, are God’s presence. For decades I was driven by fears and resentments that I couldn’t name, and that I consequently couldn’t observe, couldn’t get any distance from, and couldn’t reformulate. When I finally found some of this distance, with the help of twelve-step groups, of therapists, and ultimately of my wonderful wife, Kathy, my “self” finally began to assert itself, naming my fears and resentments and thus creating increments of distance, space, and reformulation. In this way, I discovered my capacity for freedom. Because it took so long coming, I don’t take this capacity at all for granted. Rather, I feel it as a gift—even while it’s effectively identical with (the real) me, which is finally emerging. I’m aware of the great disparity between what I was by “nature”—fearful, resentful, self-protective—and what I can be by freedom; and thus I’m aware of how I “transcend” what I am by that kind of nature. Consequently, I find it reasonable to think of this entire development as (in a significant sense) super-“natural,” and thus as revealing the presence of something that we can very well call “divine,” in the world.

This observing, getting distance from, and thus (eventually) reformulating my desires, thoughts, and feelings, to make them more reflective of me, is what I initially referred to as “the deepest and most serious kind of thinking.” Under the rubrics of the “soul,” the “self,” “freedom,” “autonomy,” and “authenticity,” this kind of thinking is what a great part of “philosophy” has been about, from Plato down to the present. (Plato analyzes it especially in his account of the soul, and of the exit from the “cave,” in his Republic.) We can see from many of Plato’s works that philosophy needn’t be opposed to a certain kind of “mysticism.” And if mysticism is “religious” and gives access to something that’s appropriately thought of as “divine,” so also does this deepest and most serious kind of thinking, which philosophy focuses on.

To the philosophical mysticism that I’ve just sketched, traditional religious believers (on the one hand) and atheists (on the other hand) often object that a “God” who is “in me,” isn’t the God that they believe in or the God that they reject. It’s not “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” as Pascal put it. I agree that this God looks different. But I think this God in fact captures what people really care about, in “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” First, this God transcends nature, in the way that I’ve described. Second, this God gives freedom and love (I’ll say more about the “love” part, in later postings), and thus “saves” or “enlightens” us. I certainly feel saved and enlightened by my new life. And third, this God gives me, and thus the world of which I’m part, a fuller kind of reality, by making us real as ourselves, rather than merely as products of our fortunate or unfortunate circumstances. This giving of (full) reality is analogous to the traditional role of the “Creator.” In all of these ways, this phenomenon seems to qualify as (in an important way) “divine.”

If someone wants to call me a “heretic,” I have no problem with that. I don’t feel a need to be an “orthodox” anything. Though I wonder whether the stress that people put on “orthodoxy” doesn’t reflect their fear that without it, they’ll lose the God that they really care about; and I question whether that’s really true. I do want to insist that my experience is authentically religious. I don’t see how that could reasonably be denied. I also want to suggest that what I’ve found seems to represent an important middle ground between scientific thinking and traditional religious ways of thinking. My experience contains something that “transcends,” “saves,” and “creates,” and thus clearly deserves to be called “God”—but which doesn’t involve (“anthropomorphically”) projecting human characteristics onto a separate, divine “being,” and doesn’t conflict with modern (Darwinian) biology, and doesn’t depend on any kind of blind “faith.” The existence of this middle ground undermines the assumption, which is so widely made on both sides, of an inevitable conflict between science and religion.