Mysticism
In the spring of 1820, a fourteen-year-old boy knelt in a grove of trees in upstate New York and saw “two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air” (Joseph Smith—History 1:17). He saw them, heard them speak, and was addressed by name. This was a direct experience of God, yet it differed from the wordless absorption described in much of the world’s mystical literature. Mysticism is the pursuit or experience of direct, unmediated union with the divine. The word comes from the Greek mystikos, “pertaining to the mysteries,” from mystēs, an initiate into sacred rites.
Is Mormonism mystical?
Classical mysticism, in many of its forms, seeks a union in which the self dissolves into a God beyond all form, image, and name. The language of these traditions is often negative: God is described by what he is not, and the soul approaches him by emptying itself of every particular. Latter-day Saints have sometimes doubted that their faith belongs in this company.
Yet Restoration scripture offers its own mysticism, one that might be called concrete. Its God has a body. Its visions involve seeing, hearing, and in some accounts touching. The person who encounters God is preserved and enlarged by the encounter. The promise extends to every disciple: “every soul who forsaketh his sins and cometh unto me, and calleth on my name, and obeyeth my voice, and keepeth my commandments, shall see my face and know that I am” (D&C 93:1).
Restoration scripture also opens the experience to everyone. Visions are not reserved for a spiritual elite. Moses wished that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and Joseph Smith taught that even the least Saint may know all things as fast as he or she is able to bear them.
A union that keeps persons
Jesus prayed that his disciples “all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (John 17:21). The oneness he described joins persons who remain distinct, as the Father and the Son remain distinct. Peter wrote that believers may become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), and Restoration theology takes the phrase at its word. Union with God, in this tradition, is participation in his life and character, the path Christian theology calls theosis.
This marks a real difference from traditions that aim at the extinction of the self. In the Restoration, individual intelligence is eternal, and union with God completes it. The person who becomes one with the Father keeps a name, a face, and relationships, and these are glorified.
The Doctrine and Covenants describes the experience in terms of light: “If your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you; and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things” (D&C 88:67). The body shares in this illumination, which grows through sanctification until the person sees God.
Mysticism and the sciences of mind
Researchers have studied the brain during prayer and meditation and found consistent patterns of activity. Some conclude that religious experience is nothing more than neural events. Latter-day Saint theology does not require that conclusion. If spirit is a refined form of matter, as Restoration scripture teaches, then a physical basis for spiritual experience is exactly what we should expect. An experience can involve the brain and still be an encounter with God.
The question also runs in the other direction. If spiritual experience has physical correlates, then the condition of the body matters to the life of the spirit. Fasting, rest, music, and quiet have long belonged to devotional practice, and each works partly through the body. Attention to these conditions fits a faith that teaches that “the spirit and the body are the soul of man” (D&C 88:15).
Mormon Transhumanists are also interested in practices and technologies that might deepen attention, quiet distraction, or strengthen empathy. That said, experiences produced or assisted by technology call for the same discernment as any other spiritual claim. The test the Savior gave still applies: “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20). An experience that leads to greater charity, humility, and faithfulness bears good fruit, whatever its occasion.
Toward one heart and one mind
The mysticism of the Restoration is finally communal. Enoch’s city was called Zion “because they were of one heart and one mind” (Moses 7:18). The union sought with God extends to union among his children, and the technologies that connect human minds may serve that end if love governs their use. Restoration mysticism seeks God’s presence in the body and in community, and it treats spiritual experience and human enhancement as two paths toward the same oneness with God.