Profs & Pints San Francisco: Exploring Mysticism

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “Exploring Mysticism,” on mystical thought and experience throughout the centuries and its potential to bring enchantment to life today, with Niklaus Largier, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and scholar of mystical traditions since late antiquity.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://profsandpints.ticketleap.com/mysticism/ .]

In the history of religions the “mystical”, connected to both bodily and spiritual ecstatic experience, has always had a special status. Usually associated with a deeper and extraordinary experience of the world and of faith, and often associated with bodily practices that produce states both intense and overwhelming, it has long challenged habits of understanding, including how people perceive themselves.

Come to San Francisco’s Bartlett Hall to gain an understanding of mystical traditions and what they still offer us with Niklaus Largier, who has taught about and published on mystical traditions for more than 30 years and is the author of books such as Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses and In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal.

Professor Largier will start by discussing what is meant by mysticism and how mysticism relates to practices of prayer, meditation, and contemplation that move us outside of everyday patterns of life. He’ll talk about how we associate such experiences with figures like Teresa of Avila or Meister Eckhart, mystics in the Christian tradition who, respectively, emphasized ecstatic love and spiritual detachment, but we also can find more recent examples in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the paintings of Mark Rothko, or the novels of Philip K. Dick.

You’ll learn how mysticism emphasizes the genuinely erotic character of knowledge and experience and shamanic communication beyond the borders of the familiar. It is open to the divine in the heavens, in the body, and in the world, while also often expressing something transgressive and filled with desire, sometimes involving flagellation and whipping in scenarios of utter submission and abandonment. It promises a different and more intense way of experiencing life.

Although it now exists mainly on the margins of everyday life, mysticism continues to be a powerful tool for rediscovering a sense of enchantment and seeing what’s around us in a new light. You’ll emerge from this talk with a better understanding of mysticism’s potential. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30. Parking available nearby at the Mason O'Farrell garage.)

Image: Whirling dervish followers of Sufi mysticism perform in Istanbul. (Photo by Vladimer Shioshvili / Wikimedia Commons.)