3 - The Mystic: Life without Limits

Summary

And he pressed on to the limits without limits,

where opposites unify.

And he pressed on further, and discovered the crooked

most straight of all paths,

And took it until he arrived some time at a place

without time and without place.

HAYIM NAHMAN BIALIK

‘Hetsits vamet’ (‘He Glanced and Died’)

WHO IS A MYSTIC? One who is gifted with spiritual greatness, vision, imagination, inspiration, and the ability to be exalted; one who is able, awake or in dreams, to cross boundaries of consciousness and to experience a feeling of immediate contact with higher worlds; one who experiences a transition from one reality to another through visions or dreams. The mystic ascribes a profound meaning to dreams and other manifestations of a personal inner world and regards them as sources of inspiration. The mystic is able to decipher the complexities of language and fathom the sacred text. By using mystical metaphors or kabbalistic symbols he is able to reinterpret the literal meaning of the text. These symbols and metaphors represent imaginative entities and invisible voices and intricately convey a reality that is invisible or beyond rational comprehension. The mystic is capable of denying reality to a certain extent; this releases him from the constraints of his time and place and enables him to offer an alternative reading of historical circumstances. By virtue of inner illumination or inspiration and authority from higher worlds, the mystic shatters existing frameworks, deconstructs established distinctions, and lives in the enigmatic world of Torah mysteries. The mystic has the courage to go beyond the bounds of the conventional point of view and the determinate state of the world and to free reality from its inflexibility. He grasps revealed and hidden reality in its ambiguity and multifariousness as an ongoing process in which he perceives endless possibilities, meanings, and interpretations.

In the Jewish tradition people blessed with these qualities have been called prophets, visionaries, masters of secrets, kabbalists, tsadikim, or holy people. Their essential attributes were defined by a variety of concepts expressing the blurring of boundaries and the transcendence of limitations. In his consciousness and in the consciousness of those around him, a mystic ‘transcends nature’. He ‘ascends to higher worlds’, ‘enters the pardes’, and ‘descends to the chariot’. He is blessed by the ‘ascent of the soul’ and ‘the revelation of Elijah’.