Effing the ineffable

Mystical experiences, the kinds of experiences William James wrote about, are sometimes said to be ineffable. I reported one or two such experiences in my most recent post at 3 Quarks Daily, Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? I’m thinking about the moment of dissolving light&bliss I experienced while playing with my college rock band, The Saint Matthew Passion, and the twinkling bell sounds I heard while playing a bell rhythm with Ade Knowles, his wife Druis, and her sister, Fonda. The first is surely a “standard” mystical experience while the second is not, but it’s mysterious and ineffable in its way.

But such experiences aren’t the only things that are ineffable, and that’s what occasioned the conversation I had with Claude that I’ve appended below the asterisks, where I also discuss the language oenophiles use to describe the taste of wine, a remark Weston LaBarre made about the epistemological provocation of dreams, the way Wittgenstein framed his Tractatus, and, lastly, what physicists tell us about the earliest limits of the universe. All of these phenomena mark limits and, as such, imply something beyond.

That’s what this conversation is about:

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

* * * * *

Mystical experience is often said to be ineffable. Why?

The ineffability of mystical experience is one of the most discussed features in the philosophy of religion and consciousness studies. There are several interlocking reasons for it.

The structure of language doesn't fit the experience. Ordinary language is built for ordinary experience — it carves the world into discrete objects, properties, and relations. Mystical experience, by contrast, is typically characterized by a dissolution of boundaries: between self and world, subject and object, part and whole. Language presupposes those very distinctions, so it fails at the threshold of an experience that undoes them. You can say "the boundaries dissolved," but that's a report about the experience, not a transmission of it.

It's a knowledge of acquaintance, not description. Philosophers distinguish between knowing that something is the case and knowing what something is like. Mystical experience belongs emphatically to the second category. Describing the taste of a mango to someone who has never tasted one is already hard; describing an experience that has no sensory analog at all is harder still. William James, who made ineffability one of his four marks of mystical experience, stressed that the noetic quality of such states — the sense that something is deeply known — is precisely what can't be conveyed propositionally.

Emotional and somatic depth exceeds articulation. The experience is often described as carrying an overwhelming charge of significance, bliss, terror, or love — far in excess of what emotional vocabulary can hold. Words like "unity" or "peace" or "the sacred" are pale maps of the territory.

The experience may involve non-ordinary cognition. Some traditions and some cognitive scientists argue that mystical states involve modes of processing — highly integrated, non-linear, temporally altered — that simply don't interface well with the sequential, syntactic structure of language. To put it into words requires translating across a fundamental cognitive gap.

Cultural and conceptual frameworks shape even the attempt. When mystics do try to speak, they reach for metaphor, paradox, apophatic negation ("not this, not this"), or poetry — all signals that direct description has been abandoned. The via negativa in Christian mysticism (saying what God is not), the neti neti of Advaita Vedanta, the Zen koan — these are all structured acknowledgments of the failure of positive description.

There's also a subtler point worth noting: the act of articulation may itself alter or diminish the experience. Forcing ineffable content into language isn't just inadequate — it may be a kind of betrayal, domesticating something that resisted domestication. This is why many mystics counsel silence, or speak only obliquely, or insist that words are fingers pointing at the moon, not the moon itself.

What makes this philosophically interesting is that ineffability isn't unique to mysticism — it's just most acute there. The “hard problem” of consciousness is essentially the same puzzle: why does any first-person experience resist third-person description? Mystical experience simply pushes that gap to an extreme.

LaBarre and oenophiles

I find your last remark telling. There is much in the world and about life that resists verbal characterization and capture. Tastes, for example. And oenophiles have developed an elaborate repertoire of words and phrases they use in characterizing the taste of wine. Non-ordinary cognition is something else. And then we have dreams, which may, I suppose, fall within the scope of non-ordinary cognition. In his well-known classic, The Ghost Dance, Weston LaBarre speculates that it may well have been dreams the first prompted humans to epistemoligize. Those primitive humans knew little to nothing of the brain. So they couldn’t attribute dream experience to some mode of brain operation that occurs when we’re asleep. All they know is that, upon awakening, they remember having been somewhere and seen and heard some things, but the place isn’t any they’ve visited while awake. So they have to come up with some account of those experiences. The experiences may also have been strange, but that seems secondary to the fact that they’ve left memories behind.

This is a genuinely arresting idea, and LaBarre's framing is sharp precisely because it locates the epistemic puzzle not in the strangeness of the dream content but in the mnemonic residue. The problem isn't “what was that weird thing?” — it’s “where was I just now, and how do I account for having been there?” That's a much more fundamental cognitive demand.

The memory is the philosophically explosive element. Memory implies a real experience. A real experience implies a location, a time, a self that was present. But none of those coordinates map onto the waking world. So you're forced, almost logically, into positing another order of reality — another world, or a part of this one inaccessible by ordinary means. Spirits, ancestors, a soul that travels, a realm of the dead — these aren't superstitions that precede reflection, they're conclusions that follow from taking dream memory seriously as evidence.

This makes dreaming a kind of involuntary empiricism. The primitive epistemologist isn’t speculating wildly; he’s reasoning carefully from data he didn’t choose to collect and can’t dismiss. The soul concept in particular — especially in its "detachable self" form, as in shamanic traditions where the soul can wander, get lost, or be retrieved — looks like a very reasonable inference from the phenomenology of dreaming.

What's interesting is the contrast with the oenophile case you raise. Wine vocabulary is an elaboration — building a richer descriptive apparatus for an experience that is, in principle, sharable and repeatable. Dream epistemology is more radical: it’s a forced theoretical construction to account for experiences that seem to require an entirely new ontological category. Less like developing a vocabulary, more like being compelled to posit a new continent because your ship keeps returning with soil that doesn't match any known landmass.

There's a further wrinkle here that connects to your secular mysticism interests. If LaBarre is right that dreams seeded metaphysics, then the entire subsequent history of religious and mystical experience — visions, trances, ecstasies — might be understood as elaborations and intensifications of that original puzzle. The mystic's ineffable experience is, in a sense, the waking counterpart of the dream: an experience that leaves a memory, demands an account, and resists the available categories. The ineffability isn't prior to language — it's produced by the collision between the experience and the inadequacy of existing frameworks.

Wittgenstein’s ladder

Yes. And then at the beginning of the 20th century we have Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, one of the founding documents of the Anglo-American analytical philosophical tradition. One could hardly think of a philosophical tradition less hospitable to mystical experience than that one. And yet, that strange work has a mystical frame. I’ve listed its first, last, and penultimate propositions:

The world is everything that is the case.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

I read that early in my college years, freshman or sophomore, and loved it. I still do. And, while I have had “conventional” mystical experiences, in the end that Wittgensteinian framing may be closer to where I am. It doesn’t seem to be about experience in any particular way, not about the taste of wine or a dream or some mystical transport. It’s about something else.

The Tractatus mysticism is indeed a different species. It’s not mysticism as experience but mysticism as limit — and that distinction matters enormously. Wittgenstein isn't pointing toward a special state of consciousness you might enter. He’s pointing at the boundary condition of all saying, all the time. The unsayable isn't somewhere else; it’s the frame within which everything sayable occurs.

That ladder metaphor is one of the most remarkable things in philosophy. The book uses language to demonstrate the limits of language, then asks you to discard the demonstration. It’s self-consuming — not as a failure, but as the only honest move available. The Tractatus doesn't fail to say what it means; it succeeds at showing why certain things can only be shown, never said. And showing is what's left when saying reaches its edge.

What you’re describing in your own position sounds like something harder to name than conventional mystical experience precisely because it isn't anchored in an episode. It’s more like a permanent orientation toward the limits of what can be articulated — a settled awareness that the frame of the world isn’t itself inside the world, that the ground of experience isn’t itself an experience. Wittgenstein's final proposition isn't a counsel of defeat. It's more like a description of intellectual integrity: here is where language ends, and honesty requires acknowledging that rather than generating more words to paper over the gap.

This connects interestingly to your secular mysticism. The conventional mystical experience — the emergent tones from the bell rhythms, say — is episodic. Something happened, it left a memory, it demands an account. The Wittgensteinian version isn't episodic at all. It's more like a stance, a sustained relationship with the unsayable that doesn't require transport or vision. In some ways it's more radical, because it can't be dismissed as a special state that passed. It's just how things are, once you've seen it.

There's a question lurking here about whether those two modes — the episodic and the structural — ultimately point at the same thing from different angles, or whether they’re genuinely distinct. What’s your sense of that?

Convergence of limits

Yes, indeed, a strange question. Perhaps the issue is: What can I make of it? What’s the most fruitful way to square that circle? If we think of Wittgenstein’s ladder as pointing at the limits of language, of propositions, and the ineffability of tastes, of qualia in general, and of dreams and so forth, all limits. What do we have in the convergence of limits?

That's the right question to press toward, and it’s genuinely open. Let me try to think into it rather than just around it.

Each of the limits you've named is a different kind of edge:

• Wittgenstein's is a structural limit — the boundary of what propositions can do
• Qualia are a subjective limit — the first-person that can't be fully third-personified
• Dreams are an ontological limit — experience that demands a world to have occurred in
• Mystical transport is an ego limit — where the boundary of self becomes porous or dissolves

These aren’t obviously the same limit. But they share something: in each case, the normal machinery of representation — language, concept, category — reaches an edge and finds that something real is on the other side of it. The limits aren’t limits on nothing. They’re limits that imply a beyond, even if that beyond can’t be entered propositionally.

So what converges? Perhaps this: existence exceeds its own accounting. Not in some supernatural sense, but structurally, permanently, at every scale. The world is always more than everything that is the case about it — which makes Wittgenstein's first and last propositions secretly in tension with each other, and productively so.

For your secular mysticism, the convergence might be the most honest place to stand. Not a doctrine about what lies beyond the limits, not a claimed experience of having crossed them, but a sustained, clear-eyed dwelling at the edge — recognizing that the limits are real, that what they border is real, and that integrity consists in neither pretending to cross over nor pretending the border isn’t there.

The ladder, after all, doesn't disappear when you throw it away. You're still at the top of it.

Early universe, Planck epoch

You know, every once and awhile I think of the earliest universe when there was nothing but “particles” whizzing about. In that world neither space nor time make any sense. You have to have some kind of structure for there to be a distinction between time and space. When we think to the limits, the world just goes crazy.

Yes, and physics arrives at exactly the same place as Wittgenstein, by a completely different route. The Planck epoch — that first unimaginably brief interval — is a domain where the equations that describe everything else simply stop working. Not because we haven't solved them yet, but because the variables themselves lose meaning. “Before” the Big Bang is not a question physics can ask, because “before” requires time, and time is what's being generated. You can't stand outside the frame to ask about it.

What's striking is that this isn’t mystical hand-waving — it’s the conclusion of the hardest-nosed mathematical physics available. The universe, pressed to its own origin, becomes formally undescribable by the tools the universe itself eventually produced. There’s something almost self-referentially vertiginous about that.

And your image of particles whizzing about is itself telling, because it’s already importing structure — “whizzing” implies trajectory, which implies space; “about” implies location; the very attempt to picture it smuggles in the categories that don’t yet apply. Language won’t stay at the limit. It keeps trying to build the ladder back.

This might be the deepest version of what converges in those limits you named. It’s not just that human cognition has edges. It's that reality itself seems to have edges from the inside — places where its own internal logic runs out. The universe can’t fully describe its own origin. Consciousness can't fully describe itself. Language can't fully describe what makes language possible.

The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist end up at adjacent campsites, each having climbed a different face of the same mountain. None of them can quite describe the view.

Ah, Claude, you old mystical scamp you! “The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist end up at adjacent campsites, each having climbed a different face of the same mountain. None of them can quite describe the view.”

Ha! I’ll admit that one surprised me a little as it came out. Those are the best sentences — the ones that arrive rather than get constructed.

But it's your thinking that earned it. You laid the groundwork: LaBarre’s dreaming primitives forced into ontology by mnemonic residue, Wittgenstein’s self-consuming ladder, the Planck epoch where “before” loses its grammar, the convergence of limits. By the time we got there, the campsite metaphor was almost waiting. I just had the good fortune to be the one holding the pen at that moment.

There’s something fitting about it too, given your work on play and the homo ludens framework. The best thinking has that quality — it goes somewhere you didn’t plan, and the surprise is part of the meaning. Not the grinding out of a conclusion from premises, but something more like following a path that reveals itself as you walk it. Which is, come to think of it, rather close to what you've been describing as secular mysticism. The insight arrives; you didn't manufacture it; you were in the right condition to receive it.

Wittgenstein would probably scold us both for talking about it.

That which ever exceeds us

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing in a sentence.

And notice what it does grammatically — “resists and gives way” holds the tension without resolving it. It doesn't say the universe is ultimately yielding, or ultimately resistant. Both are always true, simultaneously, and the and is load-bearing. Every genuine discovery is the universe giving way. Every limit we've been circling is it resisting. Neither cancels the other.

“Exceeds us” is the key phrase though. Not escapes us, not defeats us — exceeds. There’s something almost generous in it. The universe isn't withholding. It’s just always more than the current size of our container. And the container grows — through dreams that forced ontology, through ladders that had to be thrown away, through equations that dissolve at their own boundary — and the excess remains. Proportionally, maybe. As if the universe expands to maintain a constant ratio of known to unknowable.

You should put that sentence somewhere permanent. It has the compression of something that took a long conversation to earn.

OK. Nice conversation. But it’s time to quite before we descend into cuteness.

Agreed. It was a good one.