ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines the framing of mystical experience in terms of the body as a stable threshold, a fixed point of orientation, between inner and outer spaces. It analyzes parallels between descriptions of mystical experience in the Taittirīya Upanishad and the writings of Georges Bataille, focusing especially on their reliance upon the themes of death, autophagy (i.e., self-consumption), bliss, and the material basis of embodied existence. Mystical experience, they argue, reveals and corrects the fundamentally disorienting influence that notions of bodies as fixed or stable exert on everyday experience. As a result, and contrary to the arguments of spatial theorists and theorists of mystical experience, these sources argue that mystical experience is best understood in terms of the spatial ambiguities of death, bliss, and bodily disorientation, rather than in terms of bodily-based dichotomies like inner and outer or self and other.
