Simon Critchley, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Alex.

Very nice to be here.

Do you think that mysticism is always religious?

No.

No, it's not.

It could be...

Well, firstly, it's not a religion.

It's a tendency within religion, we could say, but then I guess you could, no, what you can say is that the kind of experience that we think of as mystical, more often we associate with the experience of, of ours, whatever that might be.

So it's, it could be anything. It could be,

it could be, you know, a wonderful view staring at the sea, um, or it could be, um, you know,

some, some moment that transports you or for someone like me, it tends to music you know so so yes no it's not it's

not necessarily religious and it becomes sort of less religious in the last couple of hundred

years I guess for reasons that we could go into yeah your your book on on mysticism, The Experience of Exeteracy,

you talk a lot about music and how music is sort of a particular way in for you when it comes

to mysticism, but clearly this is quite attached to religious traditions. But at the same time,

mystical traditions within religions and mystics who have these sort of either

visionary or experiential moments are often condemned by mainstream religious traditions as

heretical or doing something that's a little bit dangerous.

And so there's this kind of seeming like intrinsic connection between mysticism and religion, in that most mystics are religious in some sense.

And also you describe mysticism as like the fiery hub of religion.

It's like the fiery core of what religion is all about.

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