Jiddu Krishnamurti was of the opinion that desiring to have an experience hindered or prevented the experience from coming about.
Interesting.
For where I stand, it can be inculcated through long - often lifelong - consistent, preparatory cognitive training, or asceticism, but not procured at will (in Christian theological terms, it is an act of divine grace).
Even after an autonomous, spontaneous mystical experience, however, if you hope to remain in a mystical
state (help make it habitual, as opposed to a one-off luck of the draw that may transform your life thereafter but which you'll never directly partake of again), then it requires some effort on your part to help make that happen.
I think the Catholic scholastic distinction between
infused and
acquired is pretty useful in this regard.
Contemplation is our word for a state of (mental) imagelessness, a perceptual shift in consciousness that gives someone a direct experience of the transcendent - a mystical experience or habitual state - although we differentiate between
acquired contemplation which involves a concerted effort on the part of the individual to help bring about the experience or maintain oneself in that state during "
waking life" through mental
ascesis (clearing or directing the untamed mind) and
infused contemplation which is completely autonomous, like an involuntary rapture - unless you've already had the grace of infused contemplation and are now aiming to make it habitual.
The "infused" contemplative experience (the wholly automative kind) is understood by our mystical theologians to be the 'peak', or breakthrough. The "acquired" variant is understood to be a manifestly lower grade and not purely mystical, more like dipping your toes into the ocean as opposed to diving right in.
St Teresa of Avila in her
Interior Castle (1517)
described "
acquired" contemplation in its highest mode as being akin, analogically, to watering a garden by means of a waterwheel.
Infused, by contrast, is compared by her to a garden being watered by rainfall. "
This stage of prayer is totally mystical, meaning that it is infused by God and is not attained by human effort."
She explained that whilst you cannot exercise control over
when or if the rain falls, in the same sense as you can direct the turning of the waterwheel, a person is able to
prepare to receive the shower through ascetic practice and thus be in a better mental disposition for it.
And the path to beginning down this road, if one consciously chooses the contemplative life, is very simple - all you need to do is learn to sit still and have a less distracted mind, one that is not distracted by "
the senses and the operations of the intellect" but has clear focus:
"....The natural, normal, mode of operation of the mind during its present state of union with the body, is by sense impressions, images, concepts, 'intelligible species', reasoning; when it operates in another mode, without these means it is acting mystically. Fr Browne says:
In theory it is necessary, unless we want to be lost in hopeless confusion, to state firmly that, as soon as one ceases to use discourse of the faculties, so soon one's prayer begins to be passive and one is really entering on the mystic road' (op, cit. p. 138). This seems to afford a true and easily applicable discriminant delimiting the frontier between mystical and non-mystical prayer."
(Dom Cuthbert Butler OSB, Western Mysticism (published 1922)
It has been empirically found that those who do so, by and large, eventually experience the
infused state.
For two thousand years, Christian monastics - just like ascetics of other religions - have plumbed the depths of the mystical experience and extensively chronicled it by "
preparing" the mind in this way.
In the process, an entire branch of theology developed from which modern scholars actually derived the term "mystical" for this class of experiences:
Dictionary : MYSTICAL THEOLOGY
The science of the spiritual life, with stress on the operation of divine grace. It deals with the higher forms of mental prayer and with such extraordinary phenomena as are recorded in the lives of the saints. It is the science of the study of the mystic states.
Note how it is described as a "
science".
Mystical theology - Wikipedia
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Mystical Theology
Mystical theology has a nomenclature all its own, seeking to express acts or states that are for the most part purely spiritual in terms denoting analogous experiences in the material order.
Usually it does not form part of the ordinary class-room studies, but is imparted by spiritual masters in their personal direction of souls, or inculcated, as in seminaries and novitiates, by special conferences and courses of spiritual reading. Preliminary to the study of mystical theology is a knowledge of the four ordinary forms of prayer: vocal, mental, affective, and the prayer of simplicity (see PRAYER).
The last two, notably the prayer of simplicity, border on the mystical. Prayer is often called active or acquired contemplation to distinguish it from passive or higher contemplation, in which mystical union really consists.
Mystical theology begins by reviewing the various descriptions of extraordinary contemplation, contained in the works of mystics and of writers on mystical subjects, and the divisions which help to describe its various phases,
Here some theologians treat in detail of the preliminary or preparatory dispositions for contemplation, of natural or moral aptitude, solitude, prayer, mortification or self-denial, corporal and spiritual, as a means of soul-purification; these topics, however, belong more properly to the domain of ascetical theology.
What strictly comes within the province of mystical theology is the study of the processes of active and passive purification through which a soul must pass to reach the mystical union. Although the active processes are also treated to some extent in ascetical theology, they require special study inasmuch as they lead to contemplation
They have found that it is efficacious, as have Buddhists through the Noble Eightfold Path, in tandem with the meditative practices and degrees of
bhāvanā (
"mental development") and
jhāna/dhyāna (
mental training resulting in a calm and luminous mind).