There are seemingly numerous religious-studies students who would cringe and groan at Roland Griffiths’s studies of drug-induced mystical expertise. I haven’t gone into their literature shortly, however I believe it will be simple for them to say Griffiths is setting the examine of mysticism again many many years. As a result of Griffiths’s acknowledged conception of mystical expertise is one which many religionists would have already got thought-about very dated – even once I was finding out them twenty years in the past.
I say this as a result of Griffiths’s first groundbreaking study, in indicating that many psilocybin volunteers had mystical experiences, measures mystical expertise utilizing a questionnaire based mostly on W.T. Stace‘s Mysticism and Philosophy, printed in 1960. And once I was in grad college twenty years in the past, Stace’s work was usually thought-about impossibly backward.
Stace had many critics – Steven Katz, Wayne Proudfoot, my instructor Robert Gimello – who savaged Stace for ignoring the cultural context of mysticism, for being too hasty in proclaiming “mystical expertise” is one factor in every single place. And clearly, Arjuna’s vision of Krishna isn’t God calling to Moses from the burning bush isn’t Teresa penetrated by the angel, and none of those is the nondual state of consciousness described within the Maṇḍukya Upaniṣad – the latter being central to Stace’s account of mystical expertise. Gimello identified in school that the class of “mystical expertise” grew out of élite nineteenth-century actions like Theosophy: these actions seen themselves as having a more true understanding of the world’s “spiritual” traditions than these traditions themselves did, as a result of (they thought) the center of these traditions was a mystical core that they’d entry to, with the remainder being mere accretion.
The power of Gimello’s critiques weren’t misplaced on me. It’s simple to see that Theosophical affect in Ken Wilber’s work: as my article on him notes, it’s a remarkably assured transfer to say that you just perceive the world’s traditions higher than their practitioners perceive themselves; to go there, one had finest present proof for it, which Wilber successfully doesn’t. Some time in the past I posted right here a paper I’d written for Gimello the place I famous how even a famous scholar like Ninian Good would soar to conclusions about experiences that famous philosophers described, assuming that these philosophers themselves will need to have had these experiences even when they don’t themselves declare to have had them.
But it surely’s potential that that critique went too far. Stace himself didn’t go to the extremes of the Theosophists: when Stace spoke of a common core to mystical expertise, he had excluded “visions and voices” from the class. He knew that no person has a imaginative and prescient of Jesus who has not already heard of Jesus, and likewise for Krishna; you’re seemingly going to look foolish in case you try to determine a standard core in all these experiences. We may query Stace’s definition, however even when we nonetheless needed to categorize visionary experiences of divine beings as mystical experiences (which I believe is an inexpensive factor to do), it’s not exhausting to make a division inside them between “sizzling” mystical or visionary experiences like Arjuna’s and Teresa’s, and “cool” mystical experiences of the kind Stace describes. And the latter could but end up to have extra cross-cultural commonality.
Such “cool” experiences are impersonal, normally wordless and infrequently nondual. They usually take the type of what Stace’s defender Robert Forman calls a “Pure Consciousness Occasion” (PCE), “outlined as a wakeful although contentless (nonintentional) consciousness.” (8) I believe it will be troublesome if not unimaginable to ascertain that PCEs are universally current throughout humanity, nevertheless it appears fairly believable that they happen in a number of cultural contexts, not all the time involved with each other. Essays in Forman’s e-book spotlight a number of locations that appear to explain such an occasion: The Yoga Sūtras describe a samādhi (meditative or trancelike) state during which psychological fluctuations (cittavṛtti) stop and there may be “unity among the many grasper, the greedy, and grasped.” The German medieval mystic Meister Eckhart describes a state referred to as gezucken (rapture), the place “a person ought to flee his senses, flip his powers inward and sink into an oblivion of all issues and himself.” The Ukrainian Hasidic preacher Dov Baer says that one should “overlook oneself completely”; thereby “one involves the state of ayin [nothingness], which is the state of humility.”
Clearly the interpretations of the experiences described in such texts are totally different; Eckhart and Baer determine this state of consciousness as a unity with God, because the Yoga Sūtras wouldn’t. However is the expertise itself the identical? That’s a trickier query, and as a way to reply it Sure we’d have to dive deeper into their descriptions than the capsule presentation I’ve simply given. However with out such deeper investigation I additionally don’t assume we are able to reply it No – which is usually what the critics appear to do. Katz’s declare appears to be not merely that these experiences are not the identical, however that they couldn’t be. And there I believe he’s on shaky floor.
Katz’s well-known chapter says: “let me state the only epistemological assumption that has exercised my considering and which has pressured me to undertake the current investigation: There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences.” The emphasis is within the authentic, and the mixture of italics and capitals suggests one who doth protest an excessive amount of – particularly when this robust declare is taken as an assumption, reasonably than the conclusion to be proved. Katz, his critics notice, doesn’t even outline “mediated” or “unmediated”!
Certainly the declare appears suspect to start with: what a few new child human toddler who has not but encountered language of any variety? Absolutely it has one thing that may be referred to as expertise, and absolutely this expertise can’t be linguistically mediated, not less than – and if Katz means by “mediated” one thing apart from that, he doesn’t inform us what it’s. In figuring out states that may rely as Pure Consciousness Occasions, some mystical thinkers (like Baer) urge a “forgetting”, a dropping away of the issues one has realized – suggesting a potential return to the new child’s state. And if the new child can have an unmediated expertise, why can’t we?
Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.
