Deleuze and Guattari’s Mystical Atheism

Introduction

A mystic can be a theist or atheist; however, nonbelievers, including agnostic, humanist, Taoist, and existentialist, have one more way to describe their nonbelief system, i.e., they may be called mystic atheist. A mystical atheist is a secular mystic who talks about non-dual awareness or consciousness, but who does not believe in a traditional creator God. According to Russell, the common features of mystical experience are real reality is one, timeless, and good. Many Hindu mystics claim that people’s everyday perceptions are illusions and hallucinations, whereas the real perception is the direct experience of the identity of Atman“soul.” Eugene d’Aquili and Robert Newberg talk about the features of mystical experiences in terms of loss of perceptions, chiefly in terms of the passage of time, extension of space, distinction of the self and the external world, and distinction between objects in the external world. In Deleuzian theory, we find a preference for the...