A mystic is anyone who meditates to experience the altered states of awareness that come about by suppressing the attention of the mind to a single thing, until the outgoing tendencies of that mind desist and there is left only the awareness of pure being, experiencing itself alone; time, space and causality are placed back into their folder of Conveniences For Linear Mental Comprehension. There is a graduation of degrees to the mind's silence, which culminate in its complete silence wherein even silence is and is no more.¹ The least of these degrees is responsible for the peace and calm of the dabbler in meditation. The mind is what the mystic needs to discipline and focus, and the mind is their only tool for doing this, and the mind is their only instrument which can gauge the results; mind is tester, lab and conclusion in one when it comes to meditation. The human being is a mind harboring a particular collection of concepts and identified with a body. In dreams we identify with a body that is not our waking one (unless one resorts to Nightmare on Elm Street logic), yet the mind is right at home. Dreams? Waking sensory perception? What really is the nature of the continuity of a person?
One of the grandest milestones for any serious meditator is the "attainment" of samadhi, where all partite identity is extirpated. As a result of that samadhi comes to the ordinary awareness the lasting realization that the universe which is experienced is but the great toy of the mind. Neuroscience (and I would suspect all fields of cognitive study in general) is shedding light on this very same conclusion, though perhaps from a more outside (material) vantage looking in.
The flaw of nearly every mystic is that upon realizing that the world of the senses is but a cognitive construct, they exercise this prerogative by "casting off the mantle of the earth" and denouncing their "base," material nature as a base illusion. They are to an extent correct in their thinking, so far as duality is the origin of ills (you can't spell "illusion" without "ill"), but their final judgment is wrong. They fail to see that to ignore any aspect of one's whole is to invite the very division so abhorred by them. The mystic who prides themselves on the overcoming of the "blindness" of the physical/mental sensorium only becomes trapped in fascination to the blindness of bliss, not realizing that even that bliss is "something's" perception and so the union is imperfect. Understanding, partial or of mastery, comes only through the consonance of all pertinent conditions.
I propose that there are three categories of experience: subjectivity, internal objectivity and external objectivity. What I would call external objectivity is what most people call objectivity, where a given phenomenon can be observed--as it is of its own accord--without interference, communication or interpretation of any kind by one party to another. That much is pretty basic. Now, to argue for the necessity of adding a second form of objectivity to the classifications of experience, termed by me "internal objectivity," it must be understood first what is meant by subjectivity. Subjectivity is simply point of view.² What most people call "subjective" is in fact external to the point of view. The mind is not subjective because it is experienced or perceived. For instance, when one is angry they do not become anger but rather perceive the sensations associated with it and identify with those sensations. What is it that is angry? That which acknowledges that there is anger is the subject, the point of view. But that point of view is not angry. It is because there is attachment (born of the mind) to perception that the point of view mistakenly believes that the mental phenomenon called anger is its own experience and is not just a passive observation. All ideas, feelings, perceptions, memories, etc., are outside and aloof from the subject of experience, and it is these things which I would name as internally objective.
Moving on, any beginner in serious meditation will undergo an awakening of sorts from the delusion that they are identical to that dialogue of thoughts reacting to perceptions called "the mind," especially when they try to exert even the tiniest bit of control over it. Try to make the mind rest on a single item to the exclusion of all else for just one minute. The mind will not listen for more than a few seconds, it does what it wants. Control? The overwhelming majority of people just take for granted the caprice of the mind and identify with it anyway, going along with its superficial behavior and imagining to themselves that the handful of parlor tricks that they've taught it to do on command (through their goaded persistence and/or enthusiasm) for a short amount of time represent "control." Students and professionals who can concentrate on their study or their work for extended amounts of time represent the pinnacle of control for the average person. However, even then the mind is very seldom in perfect, or even ideal, obeisance. I digress.
Footnotes
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"Is and is no more" is not me being funny or trying to sound mysterious or occult. It is a serious reflection of how the mind functions upon its re-arising from the state of its cessation in samadhi. Samadhi, for that matter, is the first-person union and subsequent destruction of opposites. Each of us (i.e. our mind) is God or Center of our own perceptual universe, and when we are unable to perceive this universe because of sleep, coma, death, etc., then this universe that we experience is no more. Every perspective is unique and infinite. There is an "afterglow" or overlap between samadhi and the ordinary dualistic way of perceiving. During this period one can perceive duality or the difference between all various concepts and persons, places and things, even though one is also completely aware of the underlying unity of all things, and this contradiction is understood as no contradiction at all, but a harmony. This seeming paradox of logic defies attempts at rational explanation. It can only be understood through direct experience. Dozens (possibly hundreds) of my posts on this forum show that I've tried my hardest to express the results of mysticism so as to be palatable to ratiocination. I can only fail in that endeavor. 'Tis like trying to start a fire with snow. Pure subjectivity is impervious to objectification.
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In this way subjectivity is omnipresent because all points represent a perspective, and all perspectives possess the potential for infinite inclusion. Every point of view is unique yet simultaneously the same as every other. It depends on the development of unfolding awareness which is experiencing phenomena from a given point. A good analogy for this is pi. Pi is infinite but we can utilize pi in limited form for our practical convenience or apply its ideal, infinite form to our theoretical computations and discussions. The mind is the inhibiting veil to the simple, unalloyed, all-penetrating awareness of subjectivity.
