What Is the Meaning of Mystical Experience?

The Permanent Questions With David Brooks

Host David Brooks interviews author Ayad Akhtar about his new novel, The Radiance, which explores a character's profound spiritual transformation

Key takeaways

• Ayad Akhtar's novel The Radiance uses a character's post-accident state to describe the phenomenon of inner illumination and altered perception.
• David Brooks posits that morality is found in the quality of attention one brings to the world, rather than just building 'virtue muscles'.

Main topics

• Spiritual transformation in literature
• The role of perception in morality

Notable quotes

Attention is the ultimate form of generosity.

Conclusion

A deep, philosophical exploration of how to maintain a sense of wonder

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Eyyad Akhtar is one of America's leading playwrights and writers. His plays, like The Disgraced, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and his earlier novels, including Homeland Elegies, often describe what it's like to be a Muslim American in the post-911 era. His characters, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, are often coping with rage, pressure, resentments, hostility, a feeling of being judged. His new novel, The Radiance, is about a man whose spiritual state is transformed, who begins to radiate a glow. which emerges from a kind of inner illumination. You could say he becomes one of those incandescent people you meet from time to time. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's something of a masterpiece. The book brilliantly puts into words that most ineffable thing, spiritual sensations and experiences. If you read it, which of course I recommend, you'll be led on a tour through those deeper inner places that most of us struggle to see and understand. When I started doing this podcast, I thought I'd have great conversations at an intellectual and emotional level I feel comfortable with. But now, as I prepare to talk with Ayad, I feel like a person who is about to jump off a high dive into a bottomless pool even though he can't swim. I'm nervous and even a little afraid because I'm going to talk to someone who knows about realms I struggle to see and understand. I'm beginning to get the sense that this job is going to demand that I enlarge and deepen myself in ways I hadn't planned for. but may end up doing me some good. If you come along for the ride, I think the conversation will have the same effect on you. I'm David Brooks, and this is The Permanent Questions. Speaker 2 (1:34) I got a Speaker 1 (1:35) car. Speaker 2 (1:35) Welcome to the permanent questions. Speaker 1 (1:37) Thank you, David. Now, Speaker 2 (1:38) um, on the cover of your book is a blurb by Abram Verghese who wrote, uh, the covenant of water and other things. And the blurb is simply put a work of genius. And when I read that, I'm sorry, of course I wanted to kill you. But, uh, I thought, well, I'm a little suspicious. Maybe it's just a friend, but this book is simply put is a work of genius. I think it's just going to be one of the important books you know it's it's been a few years since we've had a novel that was really a a literary occasion and i'd say this book is that literary occasion in part because of the stuff we'll talk about but in part because we've lived in an era where so many spiritual poisons have been let loose by politics by technology by the general ranker and here's a book that takes spiritual life seriously and really lays out the inner world and describes a landscape of it. And I found that remarkable. And I have to say, I'm a little intimidated because I try to think about the spiritual life, but it's all a little fuzzy down there. And so I think one of the things the book did for me was give me words to describe some of the things you vaguely feel. And also just to think, well, how does spiritual life develop and grow? And so I guess, you know, my first simple question is, describe the premise and the concept of the novel. Speaker 1 (3:01) So a writer who has my name and many of the facts of my life, which is something I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about, leaves the city after writing a previous book in which he had done the same thing, given the narrator, his name and many of the facts of his life, and moves to the country. And after being there for a while, is out on a country road on a bike and gets hit. by a pickup truck from behind, thrown into a grove of trees, and wakes up in a hospital after a coma about 36 hours later. And as he awakens into himself, something's changed. There's a luminosity and a silence that is the ground of his experience. And then that experience seems to deepen and get more complex over the subsequent eight months. And that book basically tracks that eight-month period. And simultaneously to this, he also has a friend who is teaching at a local college where he is asked to teach as well for a semester. And so the ongoing political divisions on campus as well as within the local rural community play a significant role as our narrator experiences what some friend of mine once called it. in reading it said something like a beatitude or a state of grace. Speaker 2 (4:17) He's like, he's luminous, he's incandescent, and he's having a great time. And the first thing I love about his state of consciousness is that it's about perception. And the very beginning of the book, before we even get to the chapters, the sentence is, this is a record of altered perceptions. Speaker 1 (4:35) Yeah. And Speaker 2 (4:35) what I like about that is we used to think perception, the act of... seeing the world was this passive thing. You open your eyes, the world floods in, and you record it the way an old camera would record light. We now know from neuroscience, that's not the way it happens. But even more, I think we've learned that it used to be thought, well, you see the world, and then you think about the world, and then you act in the world. And we used to think the action is in the middle. It's in the thinking. But in my view, it's in the perception. It's in the seeing and the way you see and the quality of attention. And that you know, the quality of attention you bring to the world determines what you see in the world. If you're distrustful, you're going to see threat. And if you're loving, you're going to see people doing the best they can. And this is where I'm hoping to walk you into is mystics have always paid a lot of attention to perception. And the one I know best is Simone Weil, who was a French mystic in World War II and said, attention is the ultimate form of generosity. That primary, it's your primary form of morality is what kind of attention you bring to the world. And one of her followers, Iris Murdoch, was a novelist and a philosopher, says our goal is to cast a just and loving attention on others. And so what you see with this character is a man learning to attend the world in a radically different way than he used to. I Speaker 1 (5:55) think that's fascinating the way you laid it out. I think that's right. I, you know, I think in thinking about the book. There was a difference between rendering new experiences and rendering processes that were the result of something that was experiencing itself. That is to say, a change of the one who is experiencing. So it's not just states. And there's also a moral dimension to the change that he doesn't really understand. He's not trying to be a good person. He's just trying to understand what's happened and spends a fair amount of time at the doctor's office trying to figure out what's going on. Speaker 2 (6:30) Trying to be a good person, there's all sorts of ways to do that. Like people think, well, you build up these muscles. I got a courage muscle. I got an honesty muscle. I'm going to build my muscle and I'll be a good person. But I don't think that's the way morality works. It's the quality of love you bring to your perception of the world. I Speaker 1 (6:45) think there is something about the self-evident nature of relating to the world in a certain way. I mean, Emerson has a beautiful thing that he says that virtue is the secret pillar that holds up the world, which in a way is... It's a way of saying that virtue is an efficient cause. that the best way to get something done is to be virtuous. It may not be the quickest way, but it might be the best way in the end. And these are not ideas that he's trying to follow. They're just experiences. And he approaches those experiences with just as much skepticism as pleasure, because keeping that question alive about what is happening, why does this matter? What are the implications of it? felt to me important for a reader today. So Speaker 2 (7:31) for him, it comes as this weird gift as the product of an accident, a nearly fatal accident. Yeah. Now you... As Speaker 1 (7:38) it happened, by the way, for Montaigne. Montaigne was thrown from a horse and spent the next four days in a kind of bad attitude that totally transformed his life. Speaker 2 (7:47) The Montaigne story, I've always loved it because he was worried about how to die. And then this happens to him and he records his own body as he's near death, having had this accident. He says, oh, the body knows how to die. I don't have to worry about this anymore. And my father passed away about three or four months ago. He was the only person I've ever walked to death. And I Speaker 1 (8:07) was like, yeah, the body really knows what to do. Speaker 2 (8:08) And it was just, that was a great comfort to me. Now you have a piece, Forthcoming in the Atlantic, which is not really an excerpt from the book, but it's in the neighborhood of the book. And it's sort of a nonfiction piece. And it's really more about you directly. And you didn't have an accident. but you had a process. Speaker 1 (8:26) And Speaker 2 (8:27) so Speaker 1 (8:27) describe that. In college, I started to have a very alarming experience that I couldn't ignore, that there was some sort of a hole opening up inside me. And it was a curiously physical sensation. It was very, very concrete. And I, you know, my parents are both doctors, so I spent some time trying to figure out what the medical... Genesis of this was and could not get any clarity on that my mom sent me to a psychoanalyst who was more interested in my sex life than any kind of hole that might be opening up inside me, but I started to pay attention to this experience and it got me interested the psychoanalytic sessions got me interested in Freud so I started reading Freud and I read the interpretation of dreams and started to have some very, very vivid dreams and started paying attention to my dreams. And then had a mentor who also paid attention to her dreams and taught me a little bit how to pay attention to my dreams. And close attention to my dreams for many years, I think, opened up some different kind of space in my psyche, in my being, in my life, and led me down a path where I started to spend more and more time focused inwardly. We might call it meditation, but I'm not sure folks would recognize what I was doing as meditation. And I think there was that inner attention got me focused on a level or a layer of subtle experience we're always having. And the more attention I brought to it, just as with dreams, the more focus I spent writing my dreams down, the more vivid and more dreams I had. At one point, I was waking up every 45 minutes to write my dreams down. This lasted two years. I literally have thousands and thousands of written dreams. But similarly, with this subtle layer of experience, the more attention I paid to it, the more it seemed to open up. So similarly in the book, as the writer is writing about this experience, it seems to somehow deepen it. Speaker 2 (10:33) The sense of a whole. Yeah. Now, I have a sense of a shallowness sometimes, like I'm just living on the surface. And I sometimes don't know how to... do what you just described, which is like look inside. And I don't know, like, and you did it through dreams because dreams opened up different states Speaker 1 (10:52) of knowing, I guess. I mean, to quote something out of your own idiom, David, I think the need created an intense desire. I was a young person with a real sense that something was wrong. I'm not really going into full detail as I do in the essay about just how. just how bad the experience was. I mean, I think I felt, it felt clear to me that I might not survive, that I would do something that would hurt me or hurt somebody else, or I might kill myself. So I think the experience was not just like an disembodied hole. The experience was all consuming. And when I read Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain, I remember sort of recognizing in the spiritual crisis that he had at Cambridge and Columbia. Speaker 1 (11:40) some aspects of what I was experiencing. For me, a solution could not be to go to a monastery or go to the church. I had lost my religious faith and restoration of my religious faith was not gonna solve the problem. I had to somehow. Be attentive to the experience I was having and to trust I don't know why I had the trust that if I was That something would emerge from that some orientation would emerge from that that would help and it did it took a long time And it's one that I wanted to convey in the book, but I needed a more truncated and more Dramatically impactful way to do so right Speaker 2 (12:15) now one of the things that strikes me is your instinct when you see feel this void is not to go to psychology I tried. Oh, you did try. Well, my mom sent me to a Speaker 1 (12:26) psychiatrist. But Speaker 2 (12:27) I have a friend who suffers severely from depression. He's written about this, so it's not a secret. And he goes, he gets institutionalized from time to time. And the psychologist will not go to, he says, my problem is spiritual. You don't understand. It's not psychological. It's not my mom or something like that. And they can't go there. Speaker 1 (12:46) Look, at the root of the word psychology is psyche, and psyche in Greek means soul. Modern psychology is burying the lead in a way. We are concerned with issues of the soul, but that's a word that we can't really use anymore. And I get why we can't use it. And part of the... Speaker 1 (13:03) project of the book and part of the project of this essay was to was to try to find a language that was secular in a way for inner experience that defies the secular frame and what it would mean to be paying a certain kind of attention to that experience and so I mean I think there are psychiatrists or psychologists who do understand this and there is one in the book actually she has a she has an openness to to some of this stuff And I think the importance of it is not necessarily that we land on a model that is right, but we land on a model that's useful, useful to the one who is undergoing whatever process they're undergoing. Speaker 2 (13:45) And so did you, when you gradually turned the corner, was there a moment or was it this process of dream analysis? And then did you experience the radiance that the character in the book experiences? Speaker 1 (13:56) As for whether I experienced what... the writer experiences in that book. Well, I couldn't have written it if I hadn't. But I think I certainly am giving it shapes that it doesn't have in my life, because even though he has my name and many of the facts of my life, we are not the same person. Speaker 2 (14:19) I started writing down because all spiritual experiences are ineffable. They're hard to describe. And so I started, because I was so fascinated by how you did it, I started writing down all the different phrases you used to describe this state. Things like a sublime, burning calm, inner silence, effortless