Word: mystical
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...Tasteless ... like distilled water ... zero content of a cognitive sort... I was the universe moving in itself... no longer quite human ... somehow divine"-in describing his own six mystical experiences. Bharati manipulates the vague traditional formulas. He also confirms that the "zero-experience," as he calls it, may be accompanied by feelings of unspeakable ecstasy. But then he springs a heresy: "Fasting, prayer, drugs, self-mortification, fornication, standing on his head, grace, listening to Tristan and Isolde unabridged three times in a row ... for a mystic, whatever leads to the zero-experience is good...
Spiritual Exercises. Howls of religious outrage may also greet Bharati's description of the mystical personality. Conventional wisdom in most traditions, says Bharati, assumes that a man who has looked into the eye of God must be a saint or a sage. Rubbish, he replies. "The zero-experience cannot generate sainthood [or] wisdom ... any more than orgasm can generate good citizenship ... The mystic who was a stinker before he had the zero-experience remains a stinker after the experience." By way of illustration, Bharati describes a mystic named Trailinga who threw stones at approaching visitors. The author also quotes...
...Christian mystic, in Bharati's opinion, has major problems. Christ made statements ("I and the Father are one"; "Ye are Gods") that seem to imply a mystical identity of God and man, but official dualistic Christianity posits an infinite gulf between the two. That gulf may be bridged by God's grace, but even then the mystic cannot be God. Fusion is heresy. Lacking God's grace, the Christian mystic must wait for it in an anguish known as accidia or "the dark night of the soul." But even when grace is given, as Bharati reads...
...such short novels as Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, The Hawk Is Dying and Car (in which a man eats a car), Crews customized gothic cliches into literary hot-rods. A Feast of Snakes is his most outlandish vehicle to date. Set in Mystic, Ga., site of an annual rattlesnake hunt, the book gathers its atmosphere from the frenzies and violence associated with religious primitivism...
...Mystic, even the high school football team is known as the Rattlers. Joe Lon Mackey, once one of the team's great running backs, now lives in a trailer with his pregnant wife and two kids. His days of glory behind him, he sells whisky to the locals while his daddy trains fighting dogs and his mad sister watches TV round the clock. It is a world in which boredom and brutality are kinds of celebration, where "men were maimed without malice, sometimes-often even-in friendship...