Everything or Nothing

What should one do with a writer about mystical experience if he lacks that experience? Does this thinker have the right to speak about it? I am one of those outsiders who—as far as I am aware—has not had any mystical experience. Yet there are holes in this reasoning when one considers that there are phenomena very similar to, and perhaps overlapping with, mystical experiences that people without such contact, i.e., outsiders, may also encounter. I am thinking of having dreams, orgasms, psychoses, and experiencing music. This is perhaps more the case with the latter three than with dreams because imagination still plays a role there. To understand this, I must delve deeper into the matter, which touches on the structural relationship between the symbolic system of language and the Real, where language is excluded, and there is immediacy—the circumstance that the mystic aims at ( Foucault, 1966 ; Lacan, 1994 ).