This is still relevant to my endeavor and I hope shows you why I am so interested in mystical experience though I am a definite and confirmed atheist. A mystic says they experience God. But actually that is not accurate at all as the philosophically trained mystics like "Dionysios the Areopagite" and Meister Eckhart clearly state. Because the word "God" to them identifies nothing, no 'thing' at all, what so ever. This is one of the reasons Heidegger is so interested in Meister Eckhart. Heidegger denigrates, especially in his NIETZSCHE lectures and in "Letter on Humanism", the concept of God as a mere object, a 'thing' ignorant people make bargains with and expect (stock) returns from in accord with their 'ethical' investment. God to them is a businessman. Whereas "God" to Meister Eckhart is very much like Kant's 'object' "X", the transcendental apperception that holds open a 'form' of knowing without an object thus providing a built in way of identifying objects that come within one's purview. I am putting this very crudely, now, simply to get to a point relevant to the above. The first part of that point I hope I have made clear is that the experience of 'God' in Meister Eckhart is an experience of a emotionally liberating and joyful . . .. X. And that is indeed ALL! All the rest of Catholic Christian doctrine to him merely becomes metaphors for that 'timeless' experience, and that includes immortality and even 'God's' existence. In other words, by strict logic, what he says is simply about an experience, AND NOT EITHER A STATEMENT OF FAITH NOR OF TRUTH! And therefore, strangely enough, as valid for an atheist as well as anyone else. The experience simply is. It does not commit one to a belief, a path of action, and certainly not into the cohersion of others into making them believe what you believe. This was why, when Eckhart died, he had just replied to the accusations of the Inquisition. This is why the Catholic Church has always been extremely suspicious of mystics. This is why they burnt some at the stake like the author of A MIRROR TO SIMPLE SOULS and the Quietists of Spain and the Illuminati of Bavaria. This is why SS. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila had to justify their writings point by point as in accord with the Doctor of the Church Thomas Aquinas. For them, God is not an 'it' or 'him' but just an experience which, logically, cannot be a support for ANY statements claiming truth value nor justify any coercive doctrine. The Orthodox Church is much more lenient on mysticism, but only as long as it centers itself on Christian imagery. Once you start thinking "Platonic Ideas", you ass is grass. That is the first point.

The second point is, If it is not an experience of "the living God", what in Hell's name is it an experience of in a finite, mortal, and material world? I think I have and answer, and in my letters to Anthony Crifasi that touched on THE FUNDAMENTALCONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude, Solitude I laid it out in an implicit fashion which he did not in the slightest seem to grasp. So now I will be explicit. The subtlety, I thought, was necessary because Heidegger was being as subtle as a snake in the grass or Nietzsche. The difference between and animal's 'mind' and a god's 'mind' is nonexistent. Neither employs words, or at least words as we use them to dominate and overwhelm and fold our experience into its inherited everyday 'They' self image of itself that we so easily forget in thinking about language. We are taught that language is a noble thing, makes human being very special (but one needs to ask, "Special to whom?" besides oneself -- implicit theology can sneak into even an atheist’s words with the greatest of ease without the slightest hint of knowledge), and makes us privileged above the lowly animals that are mute. Korzybski's saying: "The map is not the territory" applies here though. In a real sense, we have sold our souls for a bowl of porridge, i.e., "words, words, words" as though they were the realities themselves. What one experiences in the 'mystical experience' is the pure joy of being an -- 'animal' -- being purely physical, being fully alive within one's personal and unique body, luxuriating in all of one's senses at once. Without words. This is not at all the physiological body studied in science, but one's experiencing one's own life AS JUST one's own where mortality and finitude and the hard lessons of reality are not only necessary but become something of amazement, thaumazein, where one experiences limitation and even pain as something as wonderful, as something strange because it really exists absolutely on its own, a separate reality from one's entrancing but boring web of empty words. Language, since it is and has to be inherited from 'others' like my father, ALWAYS starts out as other people doing your thinking for you, and therefore, since one is condemned to use 'their' words and thoughts to think with at all, it is a mirror struggle of reversing reflection to try to truly create what is one's own true thinking that can only be one's own if it only relates to one's unique experience which, of course, means there is ALWAYS an element of incommunicability whenever one writes or speaks. This is the "existential solipsism" Heidegger and Sartre talk about. One totally lives within the boundaries of an external reality that can be described by scientific laws and the wills and purposes and commands of other people. This is unquestionable. But what you think and feel about all that can NEVER truly fully come out in even an adequate expression externally.