Customer Reviews

Mystical Experience

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Scharfstein is a writer and teacher in philosophy who has written one of the most informative and interesting books in philosophy that I know, his book on the lives of the great philosophers. In this work he admits to being no mystic examines accounts from a wide variety of traditions and comes up with eleven characteristics of Mysticism. As I am no mystic myself I have difficulty judging the validity of what he has done. I can say that this work is filled with insightful remarks.

The eleven quintessences of the mystical state as Scharfstein defines and calls them are :" sameness; separation; uniqueness;inclusion;familar strangeness;depletion;aggression; conscience; mirror-rversal; humor; Reality, as the critical characteristic is put last. To a mystic, it may seem to be the only one worth emphasizing, but he inclined , after all , to dismiss many of the more interesting features of his experience, his own no less than ours."

I suggest the reader make an effort to understand each of these quintessences, something I did not really manage.

Despite Scharfstein 's rigor in analysis, I still am mystified about mysticism- perhaps indicating that in this realm of experience as with so many others if one has not experienced it for oneself one simply cannot really understand it.