Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mystical experiences: we can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately. For similar reasons, phenomenology helps physicians. It makes it possible to consider medical symptoms as they are experienced by the patient rather than exclusively as physical processes…

The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ – phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage – so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience. One might never finish adequately describing a cup of coffee. Yet it is a liberating task: it gives us back the world we live in. It works most effectively on the things we may not usually think of as material for philosophy: a drink, a melancholy song, a drive, a sunset, an ill-at-ease mood, a box of photographs, a moment of boredom. It restores this personal world in its richness, arranged around our own perspective yet usually no more noticed than the air.

There is another side effect: it ought in theory to free us from ideologies, political and otherwise. In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the ‘isms’ around it, from scientism to religious fundamentalism to Marxism to fascism. All are to be set aside in the epoché – they have no business intruding on the things themselves. This gives phenomenology a surprisingly revolutionary edge, if done correctly.

Sarah Bakewell, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Thinking and writing as I do about spiritual experience and practice carries with it at least one persistent difficulty: that of finding words for that which is by definition, almost, beyond words. When I confine myself to quasi-scientific language, shunning anything that sounds too “religious” or “woo-woo”, I all too easily find myself in a barren, materialistic wasteland, bereft of the living inwardness of actual experience. On the other hand, if I allow free rein to words like “God”, and “mystical”, it is almost impossible to avoid the “isms”, and the coloured lenses through which they force me to see, to describe even to myself, the inner landscape of the spiritual.

You see, sometimes religious terminology, whether Buddhist or, more seductively for me at any rate, Christian, seems to be the most appropriate – if not the only possible – language in which to discuss the spiritual. But then I find myself thinking in religious language, and before I know it I am experiencing my experiences as scenes in some sort of inner stained-glass window. I don’t merely describe them to myself in those terms: they actually arrive as those sorts of experiences, tinted and glittering with two millennia of resonant imagery.

Through the systematic procedure of ‘phenomenological reduction’, [Husserl teaches that] one is… able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus examine phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness.

Wikipedia

If all is going according to plan, of course, one’s practice should provide the necessarily astringent antidote to general or naive isms of all kinds.  But in trying to write, I have to think; and if I think in the terms that I’ve adopted in order to write… you see the problem?

The danger – and it is a danger, not just an inconvenience – is that a disconnect may occur between the living, wordless awareness at the ground of things, and the view through the lenses that religious language, and all that that entails, have dropped between the experience and the experiencing mind. If this is not seen in time, then the usual remedies of mindfulness and attention may no longer work, and one may find oneself in a spiritual crisis, “often called spiritual emergency, awakening or psycho-spiritual crisis… a turbulent period of psychological opening and transformation”, when the mind’s reliably everyday interface temporarily shatters under the pressure of massive cognitive disconnection. Too often, these events or states are mistakenly diagnosed as psychotic or depressive illness, with disastrous consequences.

The power of religious language over even the most rigorously honest thought and expression can be seen in the work of any number of last century’s poets, from David Jones to TS Eliot to Dylan Thomas. The escape route, it appears, was spotted almost two centuries earlier by William Blake, when, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern”. The narrow chinks of language, the language we use to describe even to ourselves what is beyond language, must swing away before the bright ground of all that is.

What all this means for the poor spiritual writer is another matter, perhaps. Effing the ineffable is a perilous endeavour, choose how. But we must do our best with the tools at our disposal, whether they are home-produced or borrowed from another culture. We just have to be especially careful, perhaps, not to cut ourselves with the sharp edges.

*If this post strikes too uncomfortable a chord, or if you simply would like to explore this question of spiritual crises further, I have added some hopefully useful links to the foot of my Advice page.