| | Well, yes, they die in the room and in the asylum, when Azazel poisons them. And if it were just a tale of insanity, then the insanity would end with their deaths. But the story and their experience does not end there.
You put me in the strange position of having to claim to be an expert on mysticism. All I can do is repeat that mysticism, as defined by my Oxford American dictionary, consists of "belief that unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute . . . may be attained thru contemplation and self-surrender." Mere belief in the afterlife may be belief in the supernatural, but someone who simply believes that if one, say, mechanically obeys the Ten Commandments, they will go to heaven is not usually called a mystic. The mystic sits around and prays, and self-abnegates, and does silly things to the soul. Margarita may have been insane, but she was simply sitting on a park bench when Azazel offered her the potential reward of concrete revenge against her husbands enemies if she would agree to be the queen of the Devil's Night Ball. That may or may not have been insanity. (You claim insanity since you insist that unreal things cannot possibly happen to real fictional people.) But insanity or not it was practical magic, not the sublimation of the soul through selflessness.
Note that in the novel, M&M are denied communion with the Deity, and instead find happiness in a very concrete human form "allowed to spend the rest of eternity together in a small cottage." In other words, they live happily ever after.
From wikipedia:
Mysticism
Mysticism (from the Greek μυστικός, mystikos, an initiate of a mystery religion)[1] is the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight. Mysticism usually centers on a practice or practices intended to nurture those experiences or awareness.
Mysticism may be dualistic, maintaining a distinction between the self and the divine, or may be nondualistic. Differing religious traditions have described this fundamental mystical experience in different ways:
Nullification and absorption within God's Infinite Light (Hassidic schools of Judaism)
Complete non-identification with the world (Kaivalya in some schools of
Hinduism, including Sankhya and Yoga; Jhana in Buddhism)
Liberation from the cycles of Karma (Moksha in Jainism and Hinduism,
Nirvana in Buddhism)
Deep intrinsic connection to the world (Satori in Mahayana Buddhism, Te in Taoism)
Union with God (Henosis in Neoplatonism and Brahma-Prapti or Brahma-
Nirvana in Hinduism, fana in Sufism)
Theosis or Divinization, union with God and a participation of the divine nature (in Catholic Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy)
Innate Knowledge (Irfan and Sufism in Islam)
Experience of one's true blissful nature (Samadhi Svarupa-Avirbhava in
Hinduism and Buddhism)
Seeing the Light, or "that of God", in everyone (Quakerism)
Enlightenment or Illumination are generic English terms for the phenomenon, derived from the Latin illuminatio (applied to Christian prayer in the 15th century) and adopted in English translations of Buddhist texts, but used loosely to describe the state of mystical attainment regardless of faith.
Mystic traditions form sub-currents within larger religious traditions—such as Kabbalah within Judaism, Sufism within Islam, Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism within Hinduism, Christian mysticism within Christianity—but are often treated skeptically and sometimes held separately, by more orthodox or mainstream groups within the given religion, due to the emphasis of the mystics on direct experience and living realization over doctrine. Mysticism is sometimes taken by skeptics or mainstream adherents as mere obfuscation, though mystics suggest they are offering clarity of a different order or kind. In fact, a basic premise of nearly every mystical path, regardless of religious affiliation, is that the experiences of divine consciousness, enlightenment and union with God that are made possible via mystical paths, are available to everyone who is willing to follow the practice of a given mystical system. Within a given mystical school, or path, it is much more likely for the mystical approach to be seen as a divine science, because of the direct, replicable elevation of consciousness the mystical approach can offer to anyone, regardless of previous spiritual or religious training.
From For The New Intellectual:
The damnation of this earth as a realm where nothing is possible to man but pain, disaster and defeat, a realm inferior to another, “higher,” reality; the damnation of all values, enjoyment, achievement and success on earth as a proof of depravity; the damnation of man’s mind as a source of pride, and the damnation of reason as a “limited,” deceptive, unreliable, impotent faculty, incapable of perceiving the “real” reality and the “true” truth; the split of man in two, setting his consciousness (his soul) against his body, and his moral values against his own interest; the damnation of man’s nature, body and self as evil; the commandment of self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility and faith, as the good; the damnation of life and the worship of death, with the promise of rewards beyond the grave—these are the necessary tenets of the [mystic’s] view of existence, as they have been in every variant of [mystical] philosophy throughout the course of mankind’s history.
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