The Mystical Core of Mormonism: An Introduction

Bryce Haymond

All right, it’s getting a little late in the day, but maybe this will help wake us up a little bit. It’s Groundhog Day.

Speaker 2

I’m sorry? What was that again? I’m a god. You’re a god? I’m a god. I’m not the god. I don’t think. Because you survived the. Car wreck? You folks ready to order? I didn’t just survive a wreck. I wasn’t just blown up yesterday. I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned. Oh, really? And every morning I. Wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender. I am an immortal. Special today’s blueberry waffles. Why are you telling me this? Because I want you to believe in me. You’re not a god. You can take my. Word for it. This is 12 years of Catholic school talking. I could come back if you’re not ready. How do you know I’m not a God? Oh, please. How do you know? Because it’s not possible. I’ll come back.

Bryce Haymond

I think that’s uh that’s often what we think, right? It’s not possible. Well, today I’d like to begin to show how it is possible.

Bryce Haymond

Five years ago. I was alone studying and writing on my blog, Temple Study, when I was suddenly overcome by feelings which I couldn’t describe. I wrote the following I feel completely overcome by the creative muse which seems to have engulfed me. I don’t know where it is coming from, but this isn’t standard Bryce. It’s flowing like a fire hose. Where is it coming from? I feel incredibly sharp and quick. Words are coming to me that I haven’t ever before envisioned. It’s an amazingly transcendent feeling which I can’t fully explain. This was something wholly outside my normal experience, and I was determined to find out what it was.

Bryce Haymond

Today I will introduce what I have discovered in the years since. Which for me has opened up a whole new world of understanding. I hope you will forgive the whirlwind tour. I have drafted a book By this title, which explores these ideas far more that I hope to publish. I’ve also started a new website at thymindoman. com, where There is an extended written version of this talk.

Bryce Haymond

In the months that followed my initial experience, I searched for understanding what had happened to me. I came across an article in Sunstone by Mark Koltko-Rivera entitled Mysticism and Mormonism: An LDS Perspective on Transcendence and Higher Consciousness. This article describes mystics as those who have experienced these higher states. His description sounded similar to my experience. He introduced the term mysticism to me, which I looked up elsewhere.

Bryce Haymond

Quoting the Danish historian Edward Lehmann, Hugh Nibley defined mysticism as an intuitive and ecstatic union with the Deity obtained by means of contemplation or other mental exercises. Margaret Barker defines it simply as seeing the Lord. More recently, LDS scholar William Hamblin has noted the diverse forms of mysticism throughout history and has questioned whether there is any ultimate shared divine reality behind all of this. I believe there is.

Bryce Haymond

As I’ve learned more, I’ve come to believe that the mystics, monks, and saints throughout history May have been experiencing similar transcendent psychological states. Various scholars throughout the last century have studied mystical experiences to try to determine what they are. and have found various common qualities. These include ego loss, unity, timelessness, spacelessness, realness. Insight, ineffability, ecstasy, paradoxicality, and sacredness.

Bryce Haymond

I soon discovered that these experiences of transcendence seem to be related to many different cultural, secular, and religious practices, teachings, and experiences around the world. including peak experience, cosmic consciousness, enlightenment, awakening, beatific vision, heavenly ascents, out-of-body experiences, salvation religious ecstasy, samadhi, nirvana, flow, and perhaps even our own Christian Mormon concepts of atonement, transfiguration, the temple, calling and election, the second comforter, and theosis.

Bryce Haymond

The common denominator seems to be the subjective experience when the human brain is changed from its ordinary modes of functioning. These changes are what neuroscientists and psychologists generally refer to as altered states of consciousness. States that we are familiar with are waking, sleeping, dreaming, and perhaps hypnosis, but there seem to be many more.

Bryce Haymond

The experiences that people have when their minds enter non-ordinary states of consciousness Result in a very wide spectrum of subjective intuitions and physiological sensations with extremes that include glorious states of blinding white light. Ecstasy, heaven and gods, to the opposite realms of feelings of dying, darkness, exquisite suffering, hell and demons And these can even all occur in the very same experience. They often do.

Bryce Haymond

What causes these shifts in consciousness to these alternate brain states? There seem to be many so-called triggers. Some of which we may call technological tools of transcendence. These include meditation. Including meditation objects, hyperventilation, fasting, prayer, contemplation, dancing, action sports, chanting, drumming. Pain, trance, concentration, brain stimulation, hypnosis, sexual activity, psychoactive compounds, illness, epilepsy, brain tumors. Trauma, oxygen deprivation, fainting, childbirth, g-forces, sleep deprivation, near-death experiences, singing, mantras, yoga, exercise. sensory deprivation, mental stress, and more. Some experiences may also seem to be entirely spontaneous, but it seems that these two must have some kind of underlying neurological basis as well.

Bryce Haymond

In order to study this phenomenon more closely, I became interested in neuroscience and in subjective experience. How do we know that what we perceive is real? I came across a TED Talk by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, where he discusses this question: Do we see reality as it is? We are inclined to think that perception is like a window on reality as it is, but this is an incorrect interpretation of our perceptions. When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a red tomato, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a red tomato, and is nothing like a red tomato. And that reality, whatever it is, is the real source of cause and effect in the world. Our experience of reality is a subjective reconstruction, an abstraction that our mind uses to structure and relate to our environment, but it is not reality as it is.

Bryce Haymond

Neuroscientists Martinez Conde and Macknick also recently commented on this using terms of computation. Nobody experiences reality directly. Every sight, every sound, every feeling any of us have ever had has been filtered through the biological hardware and software of our brains. Information processing machines, made from tiny sacks of salt water and protein. You have never experienced the world directly, only your brain’s simulation of it. The reality we experience seems to be a simulation constructed by our brain.

Bryce Haymond

comparable to The Matrix in the 1999 film. Our brain is the computer. It takes input from the environment through our senses and creates this rich perceptual world that we see. In this way, we are the creators of the world that we perceive and experience. Our simulated experience of reality seems to be nothing like objective reality.

Bryce Haymond

Most will probably recognize the similarities here to the simulation hypothesis. Which proposes that reality is in fact a simulation. Some versions rely on the development of a simulated reality, a proposed technology that would seem realistic enough to convince its inhabitants. I believe that it is our brain and mind that are this technology.

Bryce Haymond

How does this relate back to mysticism and altered states of consciousness? It seems that one way of better understanding the world would be to get to below the surface of this simulated Subjective experience. Our mind actively shapes the reality that we experience. By changing our state of mind, we can change our perspective of reality. Through technologies that cause altered states of consciousness, we may be able to penetrate through our superficial, conventional understanding and gain deeper insights into the nature of reality.

Bryce Haymond

What about God? Why do many of the transcendent altered states of consciousness report sacred interactions with the divine? A feeling of unity with the cosmos and even becoming one with God. Frankly, I don’t know.

Bryce Haymond

One approach might be that through these kinds of experiences one is reaching down into the absolute ultimate ends of their psyche, and that God is somehow a psychological phenomenon hidden deep within our mind. Another approach would be that by shifting consciousness to these extremities of mind, somehow opens a door to perceive divine dimensions of reality where we may meet and commune with God. These are hard questions with no easy answers.

Bryce Haymond

What seems more certain is that these experiences have had a massive impact on the history of civilization, especially in religion. The prophet Joseph Smith may have understood the sacred profundities and divine extremities of the human mind when he wrote. Thy mind, O man, if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the lowest considerations of the darkest abyss, and expand upon the broad considerations of eternal expanse, he must commune with God. I don’t think Joseph was referring to seeking great intellectual knowledge here, but rather to the expansion of consciousness itself.

Bryce Haymond

Historians have proposed that many of the world’s major religions seem to have been founded by individuals who had transcendent mystical experiences and encountered divine realities. Some readily recognized examples are Siddhartha Gautama and Buddhism. Mohammed in Islam, Jesus in Christianity, and Joseph Smith in Mormonism. Others within Christianity might include John Calvin in Calvinism John Wesley in Methodism, Anne Lee in the Shakers, and Ellen White in the Seventh day Adventists. These people or their followers organized religions to impart the teachings that were inspired by their original mystical experiences.

Bryce Haymond

Brother David Stendelrast, the Catholic Benedictine monk, has recognized the pattern. The religions start from mysticism. There is no other way to start a religion. I compare this to a volcano that gushes forth, and then the magma flows down the sides of the volcano and cools off, and then and when it reaches the bottom, it’s just rocks. You’d never guess that there was fire in it. So after a couple of hundred years, what was once alive is dead rock. Doctrine becomes doctrinaire, morals become moralistic, ritual becomes ritualistic. What do we do with it? We have to push through this crust and go to the fire that’s within it.

Bryce Haymond

Interpreting mystical experiences is very difficult, even by the persons who originally experienced them. the ineffable quality. And this can often lead to confusion and a thick layer of commentary and interpretations to try to understand them. We hunger to know what really happened.

Bryce Haymond

I believe we need to reconsider the fundamental nature of Joseph Smith’s first vision. This event is central to church history, so it is important that we understand it accurately. Mormons believe that Joseph’s experience was unique. Not many others, besides specially chosen prophets, have had such experiences. I believe this is not accurate. Such divine experiences seem to be much more common. I believe Joseph experienced a phenomenal mystical experience in an altered state of consciousness, and he is not the only one. There’s considerable evidence for this.

Bryce Haymond

One particularly striking feature of the First Vision accounts is the extremely bright light Joseph saw, even above the brightness of the sun. Many people claim to have experienced this light, followed by significant spiritual insights, including an intimate encounter with the divine. I have compiled over 100 modern day accounts. of people who have had such experiences, and I haven’t even begun looking.

Bryce Haymond

Here’s just one particularly stunning account from Clark Heinrich, a man who in nineteen seventy seven consumed a species of mushroom containing the psychoactive compound mucomol, which changed his typical brain functioning causing a profound altered state of consciousness. He later recorded his experience, which will probably sound familiar. Before another thought could arise in my mind, in the midst of a great darkness and a great silence, the heavens opened above my head. In an instant I was flooded with light from above, light of the utmost whiteness and splendor, that quickly dissolved everything in its glory an immensity of light that was also the purest love. The word Father resounded in this heaven of light, and I was taken up and absorbed by the unspeakable Godhead. There was union. This is a big claim to make, I know, and the reader may wish to add suffers from delusions of grandeur to my other sins. Yet, even if this experience existed nowhere but within my own mind and has no reality outside of it, which is quite possibly the case. Still, it remains the single most important intervent of my life. I have no idea how long I was in that glorious state, because time does not exist there, and just as there is no there there, I came back to my senses in the morning as I awoke to find myself flat on my back on the hardwood floor.

Bryce Haymond

What are we to make of this and the many other accounts like it? Perhaps these people have had real visions of God, like Joseph Smith. And we need to reevaluate this much larger group of prophets. Or perhaps these people have been deceived, except Joseph. And so we need, we reject their sincere, life-changing experiences just as many rejected Joseph’s. Or perhaps we need to reconsider the first vision in the much larger context of mystical experience altered states of consciousness and their psychology.

Bryce Haymond

It is my belief that Joseph Smith experienced the profound depths of his mind on that early spring morning in 1820. I suggest that it all happened in his mind, without any external physical phenomena occurring in the grove of trees that he perceived the entirety of the vision within his mind’s eye, and that he encountered God in his mind. That does not make it less real.

Bryce Haymond

I believe we should take Joseph’s accounts seriously, but that does not mean that we should take them literally. It seems to me that although Joseph described and narrated his experiences the absolute best that he could he misinterpreted their more fundamental nature, and we have taken his word for it literally ever since.

Bryce Haymond

This new perspective opens up new ways of understanding the First Division, Joseph’s subsequent visions of Moroni. His other revelations, including his use of a seerstone in the translation of the Book of Mormon, similar to this one. I call this seer stone Urim. I’ve used it and it works. I believe it is a kind of meditation object. A focus of attention and concentration in meditation, like many other meditation objects used around the world today.

Bryce Haymond

Four years ago at this conference, Don Bradley Noted that recently LDS scholars have suggested the psychological role of the Sear Stones helping Joseph Smith induce a state of trance or high concentration. These are, once again, altered states of consciousness.

Bryce Haymond

I perceive that today, for the most part, in the Church, we do not practice the same kind of spirituality that Joseph Smith did. That was the very cause of his divine communion. I believe that we need to look much more closely at how Joseph communed with God in and through his mind, and do likewise.

Bryce Haymond

I think President David O. McKay had a sense of this when he taught. We pay too little attention to the value of meditation, a principle of devotion. Meditation is one of the most secret. And most sacred doors through which we pass into the presence of the Lord

Bryce Haymond

God might not be found in the outermost reaches of the cosmos somewhere, but may be no further away than our very own body. Coming to know God may not be to embark on trying to understand an independent post-human superintelligence out there. but rather in realizing the divine intelligence that exists within our own minds even right now.

Bryce Haymond

Becoming like God might not necessarily come by our evolving to some radical degree of inner or outer perfection over eons of time in an afterlife. but rather in our coming to the deepest, most humbling, and empowering recognition and understanding of what we already are in this life.

Bryce Haymond

As the Lord says, You are God’s And Joseph Smith added, You have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, the same as all gods have done before you. I believe we will discover that the God we are is one with the God we love.

Speaker 2

Thank you.