Mysticism, Nihilism

I don't long to believe in God as much as I used to. Now I would settle for plain and simple mysticism. You know, feelings of oneness with the universe and all those other transcendental experiences I'm hardly ever fortunate enough to get a taste of. The reason for that is that God, as we usually understand it, is a belief that can be either true or false. He either exists or he doesn't, and it seems cheeky, if not dishonest, to simple decide that he does. By contrast, mysticism, again as we usually understand it, is all about experiencing. You can experience yourself as one with the universe, or you can feel a sense of peace and harmony, awe and joy, and those experiences are neither true nor false, they just are. And yet it seems that one cannot just feel a sense of harmony with the universe or some such thing and not probe a bit into it, not question it, at least occasionally. That's what sane people do if they're to remain sane, and that is what I do. My scepticism will often lead me to dismiss those experiences as nice but irrelevant, meaningless, empty. This, however, rather than a logical conclusion, seems to be the product of some sort of emotional reasoning. If I'm feeling pessimistic, jaded, unhappy, etc., the mystical thoughts that might cross my mind will probably seem pathetic, unconvincing and delusional. I'll tell myself that mystical experiences are just the product of the firing and misfiring of neurons in that lump of meat inside our skulls called brain — nothing we should take too seriously. That's one of my favourite lines of argument to get all depressed and nihilistic. What's interesting, though, is that the pessimistic mental states that lead me to dismiss anything that sounds mystical as self-delusional are also the product of the workings of the same three pounds of meat. This makes me smirk with delight. It feels like cheating, but it isn't.

Mysticism and nihilism are equally illogical, or more precisely, equally alogical. Reality is what it is — intrinsically neither good nor bad, neither mystical nor depressing. It is us who decide what to make of it. I'm not saying that any ideas whatsoever, being the product of our humble little brains, are equally valid. There are objective truths, like the laws of physics. Denying that, and some do, is plain silly and incoherent. But whether existence is sheer beauty and bliss or a meaningless nightmare is up for any given three pounds of meat in a skull to decide.