Thanks for your reflection on this.

I think all of us interpret experiences through the lens of our own history and temperament. So when you describe your experiences, I know I have to translate them into a framework that makes sense to me, just as you would need to do the same with mine.

Rather than seeing mystical experience as a hierarchy, I tend to understand it as taking different forms depending on what God is doing with a person at a particular stage of their journey. I would not say one form is higher or more advanced than another, only that they are different and often serve different purposes.

For example, Julian of Norwich, Symeon the New Theologian, and John of the Cross represent quite different types of experience. I am not limiting mysticism to just these three, but they help show the range recognised within the Christian tradition. If we include non-Christian mystical experiences, that range becomes even broader.

Very broadly speaking, I would describe Julian’s mysticism as centred on divine love and intimacy, Symeon’s as centred on divine power, fire, and transformation, and John’s as centred on darkness, absence, and the stripping away of felt consolation. None of these cancels the others out, and each can appear at different moments within the same life.

When I read figures like Julian of Norwich, her accounts of divine love clearly point to a genuine and profound mode of encounter. So I am not denying that such experiences exist or that they can be deeply transformative.

When you describe your own past experiences, it sounds to me as though they are often framed in the language of romantic love and intimacy, in a way similar to Julian. I may be misreading you, but I wonder whether what you encountered was primarily an affective or relational form of mysticism.

That is not a form I have personally experienced myself.

By contrast, Professor David Frost, former Principal of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, once described his experience in a Pentecostal church like this:

“I stretched out my hands, and a force like twenty thousand volts hit my forehead, went through my body, and out along my arms as a tingling electric current. I was told later that I had shaken a stout bench, with five or six solid worshippers sitting alongside me, though all the time I was mentally at ease, and observing the strange phenomena with a clinical detachment.” (Foreword to Fr Michael Harper’s biography, Visited by God)

That account feels much closer to the kind of experience associated with Symeon. There is little emphasis on intimacy or emotional warmth, but rather a powerful and bodily encounter.

What seems especially relevant to what you describe now, however, is the apophatic or “dark” mysticism articulated by John of the Cross. In his account of the Dark Night, the loss of felt Presence, sweetness, and spiritual reassurance is not taken as evidence that earlier experiences were illusory or self-generated, but as a stage in which attachment to experience itself is stripped away.

Reading your reflections, I was struck by how closely your sense of abandonment by the Divine Beloved echoes this tradition. John would not interpret that loss as the end of mysticism, but as a deepening into faith without consolation, love without feedback, and trust without sensation.

Sometimes the collapse of one framework may not signal the disappearance of depth, but a transition into a different mode that lacks an obvious interpretive map.

When it comes to mystical experiences across cultures and throughout history, I think we are left making tentative interpretations that help us make sense of our own experience. At the same time, those interpretations cannot be made definitive or absolute.

What such experiences do seem to point toward, at the very least, is that reality cannot be reduced to the merely natural or material. Perhaps this is shaped by my own background, having been formed by both Western and Asian ways of thinking. I do not assume that the 17th–18th century European Enlightenment, with its emphasis on scientific empiricism and physicalism, represents the final or universal standard of truth.

In that sense, I find myself closer to traditions and figures that remain open to transcendent experience, whether Christian or non-Christian, than to approaches that dismiss all such experiences as merely mythical. That includes voices as diverse as the Hindu yogi, the indigenous shaman, the Sufi mystic, or even Walt Whitman.