Eliot and the Mystical

Simple definition of mystical (from another class, Dr. Lynda Sexson):
experience of the collapse of space & time in a single point, an experience of nothing, finding the zero, the zero experience. The whole thing wipes out everything.

Perhaps an experience unmediated by the structure of organized religion?

I might be way off base here, but I'm just trying to think this through. The above definition seems to me to be like finding the still point, as we discussed the still point in class. An epiphany! It is non-theistic and an experience. Then how does Eliot, a man who follows the tradition of Christianity it seems to me, get mixed up with the mystical?, which some might say that a monotheistic tradition cannot be mystical. Although Eliot is a man of tradition, perhaps he finds it necessary to go beyond, and to find the logos, the truth that is common to all of us, beyond the structure of organized religion.

Using my above definition I could not help but think of this passage from Eliot's East Coker:
"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for though:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

So in order to find faith, love, and hope, you must be still, be empty, collapse space and time into a single point, the zero, the still point. There in the empty zero stillness can there be an epiphany. This experience to the epiphany sounds to me like a mystical experience from the above definition that I'm working with. Where we find a knowledge of things (faith, love, hope) that could not have been reached while thinking directly about them.

Then Eliot continues on several lines down:
"You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only think you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

This passage seems to me like language of the via negativa, the negative way, which it is not a value judgement, but rather talking about something by talking about what it is not. Apophatic Language.
We have said before that en epiphany is an experience that is ineffable. Trying to explain the experience would be to diminish the experience, so in order to talk about it, or how we got there might be through via negativa.

Which reminds me of Daoism.
"The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying way; The names that can be named are not unvarying names."

Through looking at the experience Julian (14th C, disembodied) who gets a bodily illness, she is expected to die, has a vision, sees Jesus on the Cross, the passion of the Christ, felt his dying pain, and was born through the wound. We see a mystical experience.....an epiphanic experience?

William James, from Lecture XVI, The Varieties of Religious Experience, talks about a mystical experience this way (which I've shortened considerably)
-there is the experience
-the feeling, it is an emotional experience
-the knowledge, which can only be remembered (imperfectly)
-the recognition that it is significant
-then the experience effects ordinary consciousness

*most recent class notes from 2/19 are just below this post