Descent from the peak: mystical navigations of paradox and trauma on the down-climb

ABSTRACT

The literature on ‘mountain mysticism’ includes a wide array of interpretations: Reductively, mystical states experienced on mountains may be viewed as neurological or psychological epiphenomena. Anthropomorphised as mystical agents themselves, the mountain is seen as capable of engendering non-ordinary awareness. This article makes space for interpretations falling outside of or combining such constructivist and universalised interpretations by first examining what ontological interpolations may be available after ‘the peak has been reached.’ I track the mystic’s descent ‘back’ to ordinary consciousness as a pivotal determinative moment in the narrative construction of mystical noesis. I consider three examples of 19th and 20th century nature mysticisms (naturalist John Muir, Vedantic sage Ramana Maharshi, journalist Rob Schultheis) to illustrate my assertion that it is the mystic’s grappling with the paradox inherent in the ontological trauma of descent which performs the pivotal negotiation between the collapsed boundaries of subject/object or self/Other that characterizes mystical experience. I suggest further that we look to this narrative grappling as inevitably determining the content of the experience of noesis itself. Rather than reasserting a radical constructivism, I point more specifically to ‘descent’ as one juncture in which a remarkable ontological agency directly engages with the mystic’s moment of self-construal.

KEYWORDS:

• Nature mysticism
• mystical experience
• mountains
• John Muir
• Ramana Maharshi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A related concept of descent can be found in Jewish Kabbala, where the word descent (yeridah) is meant in the sense of ‘a falling away from God.’ While in the Kabbalistic usage descent is also inflected as a kind of self-reflexive awareness of an impactful spiritual event, my usage is in a sense a reversal of the Kabbalistic one, which holds that ‘in order to achieve an ascent, first there must be a descent’ – (Kermnizer n.d.).

2. Arunachala’s power was regarded by Ramana as available to all devotees.

3. The exact year of this encounter is not given but can be extrapolated as having occurred in the 1870s. To read the full, published account, see Muir, The Mountains of California, 2015, 24–26.

4. In the case of Ramana, Mahadevan qualifies this, writing that the ‘feeling of impending death, however, did not unnerve him’ and that this fear of death ‘vanished once and for all’ (5).

5. Ramana Maharshi is recorded referring to his spiritual ignorance as a youth, saying he had little in the way of aspirations and had ‘learned nothing’ before arriving at Arunachala: ‘I who knew nothing and planned nothing have been drawn and kept down here for good!’ (Viswanatha, 1979).

6. My focus being on narratives of mystical engagement, per se, the terms event, encounter, episode and experience will be taken as interchangeable descriptors that indicate an episodic context. And I echo the terms used by the narrative’s author unless otherwise noted.

7. The idea here builds on the basic notion that the mystic subject can be taken as a liminal persona or threshold person. See esp. ch. 3 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 1969.

8. Marco Pallis, Western Buddhist, polymath and climber, connects such climbing-centred soteriological impulses in Christianity to the ‘idea of the “short cut” … the symbol of the “narrow way” leading into the Kingdom of Heaven’ (75) and he gestures towards a reading of Tibetan Buddhist ideas of judging a climb as ‘valid in proportion to its directness’ (79). (However, Pallis’s coverage of the phases of the climb prioritises the ascent to the summit, claiming that other stages of the climb ‘can be taken for granted’[82]).

9. See in particular The Medusa’s Hair and The Work of Culture. These works by Obeyesekere contribute significantly to understanding of the influence of sociocultural context on, and as, meaning-making apparatus for a mystic – which he construes as a complex of both collective/cultural: that is to say public meanings, and personal (and often unconscious) meanings. Again, the key point is that these are not to be taken as equivalent in their symbolic capacities.

10. Brown’s analysis deals with fears of sorcery in the Late Antiquity period. He argues that times of social uncertainty in the structure of the governing classes forced an increase in accusations of sorcery, thus making mystical experience taboo and inflecting it as non-normative, and then shows how political and social stability in the governing class per se reduced such accusations: ‘The society or the group within the society, that actually acts on its fears is usually the society that feels challenged, through conflict, to uphold an image of itself in which everything that happens, happens through articulate channels only – where power springs from vested authority, where admiration is gained by conforming to recognised norms of behaviour’ (21–22).

11. A number of biographers and editors have also commented on certain personality traits that make sense of this particular prose proclivity of Muir’s. Editor Fred D. White (2006) writes, ‘Muir’s view of nature as infused with spirit, as the very analog of heaven, is apparent throughout his oeuvre’ (xi). Editor LM Wolfe (1979) notes that, though a prolific journaler, Muir was also known for his Scotch reticence and is quoted to have answered the editor’s request to add more personal detail to his essays by demurring, ‘The best things and thoughts we get from nature we dare not tell’ (Wolfe, xii).