I prefer to build out my mysticism, as well as my scientific understandings, from everyday given reality, which Husserl called the lifeworld.

When we proceed this way, carefully preserving the links between what we experience directly in the lifeworld, toward what we gradually recognize as not-yet-known, possibly unknowable in principle, and (at the very least) inexhaustibly re-knowable, we develop an understanding of planes of reality beyond the world of intuitive effective action and the world(s) of constructible-destructible truth(s).

Let those with the sensibilities to conceive what this means make sense of it.

Some folks want to take these transcendent truths (metaphysics) that seem for all the world to explain manifest truth (the lifeworld) and treat them as an adequate substitute for it. “We are in the lifeworld, but not of it.” (The scientistic metaphysicians are just as bad as any other in their need to escape the reality of life. “What do I care what happens in this paltry here and now, to me and my loved ones, as long as the youuuuuuniverse keeps cranking out novelties?”)

Others (correctly) see in this kind of metaphysicry a lame attempt to escape the lifeworld, and (incorrectly) dismiss all metaphysics as escapism.

Good metaphysics never sever these worlds from one another. The ladder stands firmly on the earth and penetrates the roof of heaven, so that truth may circulate between.

If we practice good metaphysics, resisting the impulse to chop the ladder at the knee or neck, our lifeworld transforms. Reality is given to us differently. This is what is meant by revelation. Revelation is not a secret message about reality whispered into a guru’s ear; it is a disclosure of reality to our common sensibility.

I fear I will never transcend Nietzsche.