Mysticism is innately mysterious. As an experience, it claims to have encountered mystery. As a theology, it attempts to analyse that mysterious encounter. As a text, it struggles to articulate mysterious experiences that resist and elude understanding and expression. A Middle English version of Jan van Ruusbroec asserts that mysticism in all its dimensions is always poised on the brink of paradox:

Mystical texts seek to understand or impressionistically describe moments of intense experience (or the transcendence of experience), and do so using an extraordinary array of rhetorical, poetic, and linguistic strategies and subversions. In modern times, the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas has perhaps most memorably expressed the delicate indirections and paradoxical imprecisions fundamental to the symbiosis between the restless yearning of contemplation and the ineffability of mystical experience: