Mysticism has been present throughout the history of Humanity in different moments and forms, associated in most cases with religion.Although mystics and religion have no relation to each other, mystics are usually practicing some religion because this is the route usually chosen for search engines that go beyond conceptual knowledge.
Mysticism combines two very interesting facets. One of them is that it awakens sensations without making use of the senses. The other, and truly transcendent, allows one to see for oneself, beyond what the sphere of language can understand.
Those who do not know mysticism find it incomprehensible that they can acquire knowledge without studying something, someone, some means, someplace. On the other hand, for a mystic the one who does not know about mysticism is a poor blind man who, to describe what he has in front of his nose, recites what someone taught him, pontificating about the virtues of the color he has.
All knowledge is verbalizable, as long as communication occurs between two people who share the same previous experience, because words are only pointers to experiences. Thus, two mystics can hold a conversation that is incomprehensible to a stranger, just like two particle physicists.
If a person hears or reads, which is even worse, a term like «charm» will suggest something attractive to you. If someone says that the charm has a charge of color, it will even be poetic.
Ridiculous.
The charm in particle physics is quite unpopular. Charm is an elementary particle that belongs to the second generation of quarks. It has an electric charge equal to + ⅔ of the elementary charge, a spin of ½, with which it is a fermion and complies with the Pauli exclusion principle, and a mass of 1.5 GeV .1 Like the other quarks, the Charm quark has color charge, and antiquark charm has charge of anticolor; they feel the strong interaction.
The same happens when a vulgar, non-mystical person confronts the suttas.
The suttas, in their immense majority, are mystical texts that only from the mystic can be understood, and are directed to mystics, not to ordinary people.
Language as morphology and syntax is common and even vulgar. True, there are «technical» words that come with definitions that can be consulted in a good dictionary or encyclopedia of pāli terms. Using these definitions, the vulgar person will believe he understands what he reads, but once the text is finished, he will have the strange feeling that he does not say anything. He will read it over and over again, and he will even be able to learn the sutta from memory, but the semantics will continue to escape him and he will continue to steal the meaning.
And it’s all because he does not know what he’s reading.
That is why all sorts of budistoides beach bars have proliferated historically, offering more «complex» but «student» products that, without any relation to the contents of the suttas, are apt to start a religious business selling fundamental truths bottled in texts. Scholastics, for lost clients who do not know very well what they want in an active market.
Without jhānas, there are no suttas.
Without suttas, there is no Dhamma.
Without Dhamma, there is no salvation.