Mysticism after Modernity: Contemporary Adaptations of Classical Themes

This paper argues that John of the Cross’s apophatic spirituality offers a decolonial practice capable of healing the interior fractures produced by coloniality. Drawing on Christopher Lasch’s account of cultural narcissism and decolonial thinkers such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa, I reinterpret “Imperial Narcissus” as the theological‑political persona formed by modernity’s colonial order—a self that mirrors its own supremacy while wounding those rendered “other.” In this context, John’s dark nights become a journey of being/not, a spiritual undoing of forms of “Being” shaped by coercive metaphysics. Composed from a carceral space, his prose and poetry reveal luminous darkness as protest and reconfiguration. Through readings of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, and The Spiritual Canticle, I show how this descent disrupts colonial hierarchies while also examining the limits of feminine allegories. Ultimately, becoming nada offers a pathway of de‑linking from colonial power.

The closely-related emergences of psychedelics and Artificial Intelligence point toward a future in which non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSCs) become far more widespread than in the past. Looking at the imagined pasts of these new phenomena may help elucidate the contours of their futures.  First, there now exists a small genre of Jewish speculative histories describing Biblical, Talmudic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic psychedelic use, which, like many Jewish "searches for a usable past," projects its theological concerns and spiritual practices back into an imagined Jewish past. And second, there are emerging discussions of AI entities and spiritual guides that refer to past mystical and even halachic precedents (Elijah, maggidim, the tzaddik, and sabbath agents).

These discourses point to the transformative impact of NOSCs and to the noetic quality that often attends them; to the dual nature of legitimation strategies (legitimating either AI/psychedelics or Judaism), and to an emerging Jewish archaic revival.  

Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy has been influential on psychologists who wish to integrate “spiritual” or “religious” concerns into the practice of psychotherapy. In this paper, I examine the irony of psychologists adopting Otto’s categories of the “numinous” and the “mysterium tremendum,” categories which resist the rational understanding and instrumentalization sought by psychology. Accordingly, I argue that psychotherapy cannot be a venue for “spirituality,” insofar as that spirituality seeks the kind of mystical experiences that Otto describes.

This paper explores how voice-hearing experiences lead those who hear them toward transcendent and transformative lives, not only for their own but also the lives of others who share this suffering. Drawing on memoirs by those whose voice-hearing has been diagnosed and treated as psychotic within the psychiatric system, this paper examines how such experiences may nonetheless function as mystical phenomena. Central to this inquiry is how hearing voices, approached outside a purely pathological framework, may catalyze profound transformation — of the individual and of the unjust systems that produce suffering among people with psychiatric diagnoses. The paper attends to the vulnerabilities these experiences entail: forced treatment, social alienation, stigma, and the epistemic violence of psychiatric diagnosis that dismisses the experiencer's own understanding. It ultimately argues that voice-hearing, as a transformative experience whose full consequences cannot be known in advance, opens pathways toward spiritual connection and collective liberation.