beyond conceptualization. Rudolf Otto has analyzed the phenomenon of
awe and warns that the Holy can by no means be fully understood in
rational terms. According to Otto, “through the experience of awe, we
behold mystery, fear, and fascination” (Meitzen, 1993:11-12). According
to Otto, one of the most distinctive mystical experiences is
‘creature-feeling.’ Creature-feeling is the Christian mystical experience of
one who encounters the transcendental, realizing that one has been
created. In this non- absorptive type, Jewish mysticism and Rudolf Otto
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emphasize the ineffability of the transcendental reality of God.
The absorptive (or unitive) type is the mystical experience of the
union between self and God. The absorptive type indicates that one as
a little part will be absorbed into the transcendental realm of God as a
whole. This is an all-embracing unity between an individual and God.
The most significant person in Christian mysticism may be Meister
Eckhart, a Western Christian theologian in mystics. Eckhart insists that
“If I am to know God directly, I must become completely he and he I:
so that this he and this I become and are one I” (Katz, 1978:41). It is
a unitive and absorptive mysticism of the divine.
The absorptive type does not provide any validity of words to
explain the mystical experience of the union with God. Meister Eckhart
stands for the Nihilistic view of the words and states that the tongues
of the prophets who have had mystical experience will be tied for three
reasons:
First, because the good they knew by sight in God was too
immense and too mysterious to take definite shape in the
understanding.
Another reason was that what they had gotten in God
rivalled God's very self in its immensity and sublimity and
yielded no idea nor any form for them to express.
Third, they were dumb because the hidden truth they saw in
God, the mystery they found there, was ineffable (Stace,
1960:287).
Based on these three reasons, Eckhart postulates that God's very
self could not be expressed with any visual forms or words.
However, as Katz has cautioned, we should not distinguish the
Christian mystical experience of union with God from the Hindu
mystical experience of union with Brahman. Katz considers that the
Hindu experience of Brahman and the Christian experience of God are
not the same, saying “‘God’ can be ‘God’, ‘Brahman’ can be ‘Brahman’
and nirv2!a can be nirv2!a without any reductionist attempt to equate
the concept of ‘God’ with that of ‘Brahman’, or ‘Brahman’ with nirv2!a”
(Katz, 1978:66).
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I agree with Katz's approach to distinguish any mystical experience
in the religious, cultural, and historical context. There are many cases
where the contents are different, although they use the same terms to
explain their mystical experience. However, when we discuss the style
and the absorptive type of mystical experience, it is somewhat similar
to the style of the Upanishadic mysticism of union between self (2tman)
and Brahman. In the Upanishads, an individual being and Brahman are
metaphorically illustrated as a grain of salt in the ocean. Individual
beings are melted away and absorbed in the ocean-like Brahman.
The state of non-duality, in the Upanishads, is the ineffable aspect
of the ultimate reality (Brahman or 2tman) which is expressed with a
short passage ‘neti neti’ or ‘not this, not that.’ The Upanishads represent
the final stage in the development of Vedic religious thought. In other
words, The Upanishads has its antecedent in earlier Vedic texts (Embree,
1988:29). In the Mundaka Upanishad, two main states of Knowledge are
mentioned, namely, knowledge in duality and knowledge in non-duality.
The lower wisdom is to know the four sacred Vedas, definition and
grammar, pronunciation and poetry, ritual and the signs of heaven. The
higher wisdom is the knowledge of non-duality between 2tman and
Brahman.3
The Tao-te Ching (道德經), one of the most important literary
sources in Taoism, also follows this nihilistic view and amplifies the
uselessness of words to describe the Tao or Way. In the first chapter of
the Tao-te Ching, the term Tao refers to the ineffable realm: “The Tao
(Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be
named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the origin of Heaven
and Earth; The Named is the mother of all things” (Chan, 1963:139).
To Lao-tzu, the Tao which is illustrated is not the eternal Tao.
For this reason, the Tao-te Ching says that “the sage manages affairs
without action (wu-wei). And spreads doctrines without words” (Chan,
1963:139). The Tao-te Ching minimizes the value of the words and
appraises silence: “He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does
not know. Close the mouth” (Chan, 1963:166). The best way of the