Mystics claim that their experiences give knowledge of a fundamental reality, but it is important to note that the knowledge-claims in classical mystical traditions are not the product of isolated mystical experiences: the claims are always made in the context of an encompassing way of life having spiritual practices, rituals, codes of conduct, and a specified goal, all grounded in doctrines that must be learned about the nature of what is deemed real. Such doctrines may not be of much interest to most practitioners, but they hold a conceptually fundamental position in a way of life. Mysticism is typically part of a religious way of life involving transcendent realities. But in all cases, while mystical experiences are central to mysticism, traditional mysticism cannot be reduced to merely having experiences. The metaphysics of a given mystic’s tradition determines what he or she takes as the actual knowledge given by a mystical experience. Thus, a depth-mystical experience may involve an unconceptualized consciousness, but what insight the experience is taken as providing will be conceptualized after the experience and will depend on doctrines and values outside the experience itself, coming from the mystic’s way of life. That the mystics’ sense of oneness, immutability, and so on in turn shapes a tradition’s doctrines complicates the picture (as discussed below, some philosophers deny this), but the fact remains that experiences alone are never the only factor for addressing the question of knowledge.
Today people argue on many different fronts that mysticism is not in fact about knowledge at all. Mystical experiences are merely considered interesting psychological events having no cognitive significance, or mysticism is only about attaining inner peace or becoming more compassionate. Or meditation is only about purported psychological or physiological benefits (but see Ospina 2007; Chen 2012; Sedlmeier et al. 2012). Or meditation only develops the centers of the brain connected to states of happiness. Or mystical experiences at most increase our interest in knowing fundamental things about reality, but they do not provide any knowledge at all. That the Buddha taught one doctrine to beginners on the path to enlightenment and another doctrine to more advanced followers (e.g., Anguttara Nikaya 1.10) shows that mystics are not really interested in doctrines at all but only in attaining the experiences—the doctrines do not matter but are merely a raft to be jettisoned once we have the experiences.1 More generally, theory in yoga or any spiritual discipline only serves to attain an experience, and thus ultimately it does not matter what theory one holds—theory is just a device to quiet the mind, and any theory that does that will do. Mystical teachings become no more than a pragmatic matter of “whatever works” in inducing an experience of selflessness, not claims about what is real. Thus, the doctrines in the end are irrelevant.
However, in the classical traditions, mystical contemplation is cultivated to gain alleged insights into the fundamental nature of reality so that we can live in accord with what is actually real. That is, mystical knowledge is not an end in itself—aligning one’s life with the fundamental nature of reality is. The objective is a transformed life, not anything about either disinterested knowledge or “developing our consciousness” per se. Still, mystical experiences allegedly do ground knowledge about some fundamental reality necessary to living correctly. All classical mystical traditions contain doctrines about the ultimate nature of the world and persons. They also have implicit knowledge-claims entailed by the doctrines and practices of their ways of life depicting the way the world supposedly is. For example, the Buddha accepted rebirth, even though it did not receive an explicit defense in his time and even though the mechanics of how it works have remained an issue for Buddhists.2 In addition, mystics make claims about the nature of what is experienced in introvertive mystical experiences, even while denying that such claims are possible. Mystical experience is a matter, to quote the title of a Buddhist work, of “calming the mind and discerning the real”—seeing the world “as it really is” (according to each particular mystic’s belief-system). Thus, knowledge is not just central to philosophers’ interest in mysticism but is important to mystics themselves: only with the proper knowledge can they see and live properly.
Mystical experiences are what is distinctive about mysticism, but as noted in the last chapter classical mystics do not typically discuss their own experiences or the nature of mystical experiences in general. They are interested in aligning their lives with what is real. Thus, they discuss knowledge, what is real, values and virtues, how to cultivate mystical experiences, and how to follow the path to enlightenment, not their own experiences. They are no more interested in the experiences themselves than scientists typically are in theirs. The results—what is learned—are usually all that matters, not the experiences themselves. Thus, mystical statements are normally no more about experiences than scientific statements are about sense-experiences rather than stars, quarks, or whatever—i.e., something deemed real regardless of the experiences. In addition, unlike in science, the justification of mystical knowledge-claims is typically not experiential evidence but the revealed texts or other authority of one’s tradition (as discussed below).
But to mystics their knowledge comes from mystical experiences, not from reflection, speculation, other experiences, or “feelings” in the sense of emotions.3 Nor is a mystical experience an intuition in the sense of an intellectual jump from a line of reasoning to a conclusion. Rather, there is a felt sense of contact with a reality, with the proper interpretation of what is experienced (and thus of what knowledge is actually gained) being supplied by a traditional authority. As discussed below, some scholars in religious studies dispute this claim, but many neuroscientists are coming to conclude that mystical experiences are genuine neurological events that are distinct from other mental events and are not merely products of imagination (Newberg, d’Aquili, & Rause 2002: 7), even if they reject alleged mystical insights. That they are “genuine” experiences does not necessarily mean that transcendent realities are involved in introvertive mystical experiences or that mystical experiences provide knowledge, but only that they are not some more ordinary experience. I can imagine Jacob Marley’s ghost standing in my room clanking his chains; I can even fabricate a “sense of presence,” but this does not mean I am experiencing a ghost, and any neuroscanning of my brain would only show that the areas related to imagination are active during the event. Mystical experiences are not of that nature but involve new states of consciousness. Any knowledge from them, if valid, is not simply a change in our understanding but involves a new experience of reality of some kind.
What exactly is “experience” or “an experience” receives relatively little discussion in philosophy or in neuroscience. The general idea is that an experience is an event having some emotional, volitional, or allegedly cognitive content. Philosophers typically define “cognitive experiences” in terms of awareness of an object by a separate subject, as in sense-experience. We can only have an experience when we are conscious, and consciousness is “on” only when there is an object of awareness, whether one is awake or dreaming. Knowledge is knowledge of something, whether of facts (knowing-that) or by acquaintance of a separate object or person. But mystical knowledge, if valid, is a third type of knowledge not recognized by modern philosophy: a receptive knowledge by participation or knowledge by identity where there is no object separated from the knower. It is a direct knowledge in the way that knowledge of a distinct object is not: one has become what is experienced. It is not a matter of accepting belief-claims, although some belief-claims must follow. To Christians, there is no apprehension of God as an object; rather, God becomes active in the ground of the soul (McGinn 2008: 52).
Mystical experiences involve a modification of our consciousness, but there is no experience of any object (including consciousness) since there can be no object present that is set off from the experiencer. The dichotomy of appearance and reality (phenomenon and noumenon) is not applicable. There is not even an awareness of the experiencer. Only after introvertive experiences are over does what was experienced become an object of consciousness for the experiencer’s understanding—then the mind makes a mental image of the reality, and so what was experienced becomes an object of consciousness among other such objects. These experiences are not “objective” in the sense of an awareness of something existing independently of the experiencer, or “subjective” in the sense of experiencing something the experiencers themselves create. Rather, there is a sense of simply being rather than experiencing something distinct from oneself. Self-awareness is the closest analogy since this cognitive awareness does not involve an object distinct from the experiencer during the experience. Mystical experiences may be unique among allegedly cognitive experiences in this regard.
Philosophers, however, typically see mystical knowledge in terms of the sense-experience paradigm, and problems result (as discussed in the next chapter). Even some mystics are reluctant to call a depth-mystical experience an “experience” since it is empty of all differentiated content; with no object of awareness involved, some refer to it as a state of nonknowledge or nonconsciousness. Indeed, such phrases as “experience of” or “awareness of” do not handle this type of knowledge, but in English we do not have words to express this without using the idea of knowledge of something. Thereby, they implicitly accept that the terms “experience,” “consciousness,” and “cognition” are limited to intentional experiences of objects—i.e., dualistic situations with a knower and an object known. In addition, experiences are separate mental events, but the state of mindfulness and the enlightened state are continuing states of consciousness, not that “consciousness” and a “state of consciousness” are any easier to define than “experience.”
Three positions in contemporary academia deny that mystical experiences are what they seem. Most followers of these positions deem mystical experiences noncognitive. The first position denies that there are in fact any true mystical experiences or, if there are such experiences, that they do not play a significant role in religious traditions. It is based on the fact that classical mystics normally do not discuss their own experiences. At best, mystics attribute such experiences to traditional figures such as the Buddha and St. Paul. Indeed, it is often hard to tell from their writings if religious thinkers have undergone mystical experiences or are nonmystical thinkers whose systems are not informed by personal mystical experiences but are merely the working out of the logic of some mystically influenced philosophical or religious ideas. One has to ask whether the writings of a given author reveal an inspiration of mystical experiences. I would argue that the “mystical theology” of the “founder of Christian mysticism,” Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, does not evidence the author having had any mystical experience; rather, he merely applied the ideas of Plotinus, who the records suggest did have mystical experiences, to Christian doctrines (also see Vanneste 1963). But Denys Turner argues this conclusion for all alleged medieval Christian mystics—he rejects the “contemporary ‘experientialist’ misreading” of these texts (1995: 5). He asserts that these texts are actually “anti-mystical” if mysticism is seen in terms of cultivating certain types of experiences (ibid.: 4). And Robert Sharf argues that meditative experiences do not figure prominently in the formation of Buddhist doctrine or in the practice of monks and nuns historically (1995, 1998). “Transformative personal experience” may not have been as central to traditional Buddhist monastic practice as modern exegetes would have us believe (1995: 232). The author of a prominent Theravada meditation manual, Buddhaghosa, does not refer to his own meditative experiences, and so Sharf concludes that he probably did not have any. He argues that the emphasis on mystical experiences comes only from modern Buddhist apologists after the encounter with the West. And many observers note that today meditative practices are not prominent among monks in Buddhist monasteries—work, rituals, recitations, and memorization of doctrines are considered more important. Meditation is often limited to only the most senior monks. Buddhist traditions also have at various points in their history fallen into dogmatism and scholasticism as much as Christian traditions have, suggesting a focus on doctrine over actual experiences.
All this fits well with the postmodernists’ attempt to assimilate knowledge totally to the social. Mysticism can be deconstructed as simply a type of political writing—a way of expressing opposition to religious institutional authority and doctrines (Cupitt 1998: 10–11, 57). Moreover, language goes “all the way down” and there is no cognition prior to language (ibid.: 11). In Jacques Derrida’s proclamation, “There is nothing outside the text.” The idea of “mystical experiences” died in about 1978, “drowned by the rising tide of postmodern culturalism” (Cupitt 1998: 21) as no more than a modern psychological invention, and thus the possibility of genuine mystical experiences or states of consciousness can be ignored—scholars now can focus on just the books.
However, one cannot conclude from the lack of the discussion of a person’s own experiences that he or she did not have mystical experiences or that mystical experiences did not shape religious doctrines. Turner and Michael Sells (1994) rightly point out that Christian mystics discuss the nature of God and not personal experiences. But one important reason for this is that, unlike in modern science, experiences were not considered authoritative for establishing doctrinal claims. Mystics instead appealed to the tradition’s authorities (the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Buddha’s discourses, and so on). In the words of John of the Cross: “I trust neither to experience nor to knowledge since they may fail and deceive,” but to “Divine Scripture” (1958: 94). That the Pseudo-Dionysius wrote under the name of a New Testament figure shows how little authority he attached to himself and any experiences he might have had. Nor was this meant to be deceptive by giving more authority to the works—it only indicated that authority did not lie with current authors. So too, there are no first-hand reports from Shankara. For Shankara, the only “means to correct knowledge” (pramana) for knowledge of Brahman for the unenlightened is the revealed Vedas (shruti), not personal direct insight (anubhava) (Brahma-sutra-bhashya 1.1.1–2).4 In India in general, realizing enlightening knowledge is considered the recovery of past knowledge and not a discovery of something that was previously unknown and had to be established; thus, one’s own accomplishment is not noteworthy. So too, many traditions prohibit boasting about one’s spiritual achievements in public as contrary to humility, and even mentioning one’s own experiences in writings would no doubt qualify as a type of bragging.
In such circumstances, one would not expect mystics to discuss their own experiences. Nevertheless, the writings of such figures as Meister Eckhart and Shankara make it clear that they value the direct personal awareness of a transcendent reality as centrally important to their ways of life, not just the acceptance of a tradition’s doctrines. Interpreting, for example, Bonaventure’s “journey of the mind to God” or Eckhart on the “birth of the son in the ground of the soul” as not pointing to mystical experiences is tortured at best. So too with the medieval Christian mystics’ references to “rapture” and “ravishment.” Eckhart referring to making oneself a “desert” and to the “unknowing” (unwissen) of all “images” is not about the “negativity of experience” (Turner 1995: 264) but about an experience in which all conceptualizations are gone—an experience that is now filled with a transcendent reality (see Eckhart 2009: 34–36 on unknowing). God is unknowable in that he is, in Eckhart’s terms, “beyond every thought and image”—i.e., he is not open to being an object of the analytical mind—but the beingness of God is not unexperiencable. The mind is not “empty,” as when one is knocked unconscious. Nor is there reason to conclude, as the theologian Mark McIntosh does (1998: 136–37, 142), that medieval Christian mystics encouraged their followers to let go of all experiences: mystical experiences are not necessary for Christian salvation, and there is more to any religious way of life than cultivating mystical experiences, but the texts make clear that the experiential “union with God” and the alignment of one’s will with God’s were still valued. Eckhart denounced being tied to any technique that claimed to compel God to act; he valued a life aligned with God’s will over any “ecstatic experiences”; and he valued doing God’s will in acts of charity over any experience. But nothing suggests that he ever denounced awakening to the presence of God in the depth of the soul, i.e., the breakthrough (durchbrechen) of the birth of God in the soul and of the birth into the Godhead.
A second position is that there are no genuine “mystical experiences”: alleged mystical experiences are only ordinary experiences, not unique neurological events. The “mystical” element is only a misreading of what is occurring. Thus, proponents of this position note the experiential nature of “mystical experiences,” but they deny that the mystical overlay contributes anything cognitive—in particular, there is no cognition of transcendent realities. John Bowker presented this theory, not to discredit the notion of genuine –mystical experiences, but to discredit the theory that the idea of God originated in psychotropic drug experiences. He argued that LSD does not induce genuine experiences of a transcendent reality but only initiates a state of excitation that is labeled and interpreted from the available cues as “religious” by some experiencers, due to the setting and the experiencers’ background. The warrant for a particular label thus does not lie in the experience itself but in the conceptual background that created specific expectations and supplied the symbols to the structuring (1973: 14457).
However, this idea can also be used to discredit any claim to knowledge of transcendent realities. Wayne Proudfoot offers this “cognitive labeling” approach to deny the possibility of any transcendent input in any religious experiences: experiencers unconsciously attribute religious significance to otherwise ordinary experiences (1985). Religious experiences are simply general and diffuse patterns of agitation in states of our nervous system to which the religious give a label based on their prior religious beliefs, in order to understand and explain the agitation. Any extreme emotional state can be labeled “a religious experience” when an experiencer believes that the cause is a transcendent reality, but in fact only cognitively empty feelings are present—bodily states agitated in purely natural ways. For Proudfoot, a transcendent reality is not even indirectly involved as the source of the agitation (ibid.: 154). That is ruled out a priori: a transcendent reality, if any exists, by definition cannot be experienced. So too, Ann Taves speaks of ordinary experiences being “deemed religious”—there are no inherently religious experiences (2009).5 Religious experiences are in fact no more than cognitively empty feelings structured by prior religious beliefs. That is, religious value or significance is given to unusual but otherwise ordinary experiences. “Religious experiences” are constituted solely by this-worldly elements and thus are exhaustively explainable in the same manner as any other experience. This approach allows scholars to focus exclusively on religious texts and discount any role for any “mystical experience” in the formation of religious doctrines and practices.
Attribution theory may well explain many alleged mystical experiences: people may simply be attributing greater significance to ordinary highly emotional situations in many instances. (This points to the problem with first-person reports and surveys noted in chapter 4.) And some evidence in neuroscience can be interpreted as supporting the theory (Saver & Rubin 1997; Azari et al. 2001). But as noted above, there is also increasing neuroscientific support for the claim that there are genuine mystical experiences—i.e., unique neurological events involving altered states of consciousness. Objections have also been raised concerning Proudfoot’s use of the psychological data (Barnard 1992; Spilka & McIntosh 1995). If such experiences are neurologically unique and not merely other experiences interpreted mystically, they are not reducible in this manner. Taves lumps all religious experiences together and concludes that no experience is inherently religious (2009: 20–22). But the issue here is different: whether there is a set of inherently mystical experiences, regardless of whether the understanding that a particular experiencer gives it is religious or naturalistic. And neurological data suggest that some experiences are inherently mystical even if the experiences are understood nonreligiously by the experiencer. Perhaps the religious can give a religious interpretation to virtually any experience, but there appears to be a set of a neurologically distinctive mystical experiences. If so, there is an experiential basis to mysticism that cannot be explained away as merely a mystical varnish given to ordinary sense-experiences or emotions.
Mystical experiences often have an intense emotional component, and if such experiences are grounded only in the part of the brain connected to emotion rather than thought (Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998: 179), it would help the argument that mystical experiences simply reinforce the experiencer’s prior religious beliefs. Bertrand Russell saw mysticism in terms of emotion—a certain intense and deep feeling regarding what is believed about the universe (1997: 186–87)—and James Leuba advanced an early reduction of mysticism along these lines (1929). But even if these experiences have an emotional impact, this does not mean that they are the result only of emotion or do not have other components. It should also be pointed out that emotions may be ways of experiencing the world that contribute to our deepest commitments and our sense of how things are (Ratcliffe 2006: 101). That emotion and their objects are traditionally chief objects for meditators to remove since they block spiritual progress also presents a problem for this theory. So too, the “sense of presence” in religious experiences is not obviously emotion-based.
For naturalists, this means that all alleged mystical cognitivity is totally explained away in natural terms. But whether one subscribes to this philosophical reduction appears to depend more on whether one has a prior commitment to naturalism than anything inherent in the experiences themselves.
The first two denials of genuine mystical knowledge keep everything of alleged cognitive value within mystical and religious texts themselves. The third denial—“constructivism”—also has that effect. The way to introduce this topic is with the role of experience and conceptualization in mystics’ knowledge-claims.
Even if the mind during a depth-mystical experience is empty of differentiated content, depth-mystics in classical mystical traditions do believe these experiences give a sense of fundamental reality, immutability, and oneness. Thus, something is retained after the experience is over, and thus mystical experiences may be cognitive of some reality. If mystics retained nothing whatsoever from depth-mystical experiences, they could make no claim about the nature of what they experienced and could not reject any other claims as objectionable. Indeed, if they retained nothing, they would not claim to have had an experience—they would have been simply unconscious. What is retained may be a memory of a “pure” consciousness of being awake and aware, but without any objects of awareness. But once they return to a dualistic state of consciousness, their analytical mind kicks in and what was experienced becomes an object of thought. As such, it must be conceptualized. Ninian Smart highlighted different degrees of “ramification” of conceptualization: lowly ramified terms (e.g., “oneness,” “reality”) and highly ramified terms from religious traditions (e.g., “God,” “Brahman”).6 Highly ramified terms gain their meaning in part from a range of statements taken to be true for reasons of theory, while low-ramified terms do not (1965: 79). Thus, even if a description cannot be totally separated from all interpretation, some descriptions are closer to the phenomenological givenness of an experience. But mystics typically write in highly ramified terms. Mystics usually speak in concrete terms of a specific personal god or a nonpersonal reality rather than remain on the level of abstract concepts of a generic “Ultimate Reality.” But even if mystics confined themselves to such abstract terms as “reality” or “oneness,” these still have a conceptual element and are the result of seeing what was experienced from a mental distance and through a conceptual lens after the depth-mystical experience is over.
If classical depth-mystics are correct, they experience an immutable reality transcending our natural world, but the reality experienced is nonetheless open to very different interpretations with values and symbols from a culture affecting such interpretations. In the West, we typically refer to spiritual experiences as “experiences of God” because we are raised from childhood with that concept and it is the only term we know that seems appropriate. But “God” is not a neutral term for any transcendent reality—a theistic god has attributes that nonpersonal analogs such as Brahman and the Way do not, and vice versa. Nevertheless, the brain must affix some name to anything it experiences to file it into memory (Newberg & Waldman 2009: 76). But there is a great variety of spiritual experiences, and most people have their own definition of “God” (ibid.: chap. 4). In addition, terms from different traditions are not interchangeable—Eckhart’s “Godhead” and Shankara’s “Brahman” gain their meaning, as all concepts do, only within the context of a larger system. Early Buddhists translating Indian texts into Chinese first tried simply substituting Daoist terms for Buddhist ones, but quickly found that that did not work. Even if the various terms have the same referent, the referential and descriptive aspects of concepts cannot be conflated: the concepts behind them may be very different. The difference between Advaita and Samkhya on the transcendent “self” is a classic example—the universal atman versus the individual purusha. So too, most theists would dispute the claim that the depth-mystical experience is an experience of a fundamentally nonpersonal reality rather than of a personal being even if nontheists use the word “God.”
After their experiences, members of different religious traditions see the depth-mystical experience differently, and beliefs and values from outside the depth-experience must fill out the significance given to the experience. But because the competing conceptions are equally well-supported experientially (as discussed in the next chapter), it is hard to conclude that these more-specific beliefs somehow come from the experience itself or that any type of mystical experience is evidence for one interpretation over another. Even if all mystics in different traditions experience at least the source of the experiencer’s beingness, mystics still differ on their understanding of the full nature of what is experienced, and their interpretations in terms of different highly ramified conceptions of transcendent realities conflict. So too, if no transcendent reality is involved and mystics experience only the root beingness of a natural self or merely the sheer “thatness” of the aware mind, this reality is still open to different interpretations in different metaphysical systems.7
One may argue that theists and nontheists experience different aspects of the same reality, as with the simile of the blind men and the elephant (as discussed in the next chapter). But if the mind is truly empty of all differentiating content during the depth-mystical experience, this is hard to argue: there are no different aspects to this one experience. The absence of differentiated features would make it is hard not to conclude that depth-mystics in all traditions all experience the same reality but interpret the depth-mystical experience differently according to their tradition after they have returned to a dualistic consciousness. In the postexperience dualistic state of consciousness, what was previously experienced now must be seen even by the mystics themselves as an object of some sort—in this state, the mind makes what was experienced into one more mental object among other mental objects. Understanding the depth-mystical experience becomes subject to the same problems in understanding other phenomena for mystics themselves. But the experience itself does apparently remain empty of differentiated content.
Nevertheless, Christians often argue that Christians’ depth-mystical experiences are phenomenologically unique. One argument is that mystical experiences cannot be forced or earned but are the result of God’s grace—God just happens to bestow by his grace a glimpse of himself more often on those who were cultivating mystical experiences. But mystics of all traditions, theistic and nontheistic, agree that these experiences are not the product of human effort: the experience cannot be forced, but requires letting go of the sense of self. Some mystical experiences do occur spontaneously, but training that increases the possibility also occurs. Christian contemplatives too engage in spiritual training and prepare the way with effort and do not rely exclusively on grace. If no mystical experiences occurred in other traditions but always occurred spontaneously for Christians, an argument might be made on these grounds, but this is not the case. And, as noted above, nothing suggests that non-Christians have a substantively different depth-mystical experience.
Another argument is that in the depth-mystical experience for Christians some distinctive residual sense of a loving, powerful, and personal being is retained from the experience itself and is not simply a result of differentiated theistic introvertive mystical experiences or of the transitional state back to the baseline state of consciousness or of a theological interpretation applied after the experience. But again, if the experience is truly devoid of all differentiable content and all intentionality is cut off, this is not possible—there cannot be a loving relationship while the mind is “empty.” As John of the Cross says, it is an “imageless” communion. Of course, if Christians on the path to enlightenment believe that they are being carried upward by love, then they will naturally interpret any resulting experiences in terms of a loving reality. Thus, while the different forms of Christian mysticism may be unique, this is no reason to conclude that there is a unique “Christian depth-mystical experience” of a loving, personal triune transcendent reality or that non-Christians or at least nontheists experience some other reality.
While the different mystical traditions of the world can be grouped together under the rubric “mysticism” because of the centrality of similar experiences, it must be remembered that there is no generic “mysticism” or “mystical worldview,” but only particular mystics in particular mystical traditions with concrete beliefs about realities, concrete goals, and concrete practices. To invert a George Santayana remark, any attempt to have a religion that is no religion in particular is as hopeless as any attempt to speak without speaking some particular language (1905: 5). And the same applies to mysticism: there is no one abstract “mysticism,” but only particular mystics and mystical traditions. We can still speak of “mysticism,” just as linguists speak of “language” in general, and we can discuss its general features (if any commonalities among the phenomena are found), just as linguists speak of the nature of language, but we must remember there are only specific evolving traditions, and each mystic must be understood in his or her cultural context. In addition, classical mysticism was part of different religious traditions and must be understood in that context.8 Mystics think of themselves as Christians or Shaivaites or whatever, not as “mystics.” They practice Christianity or whatever, not “mysticism.” In Buddhism, the goal of the way of life is to end our suffering by escaping the cycle of rebirth—something Abrahamic mystics do not even consider. The different traditions’ particular beliefs and practices are not merely vehicles to one universal goal any more than specific languages are merely attempts to voice “language” in the abstract. Even “perennial philosophy” as a mystical Esperanto is still only one particular “language.”
Moreover, the world’s religious traditions are made up of multiple subtraditions that have evolved throughout history. No religion’s mystical tradition is monolithic: there is no one uniform “Christian mysticism” but different Christian forms of mysticism. Not all of Hinduism can be reduced to Advaita or to Vaishnava theism, let alone all Asian traditions to one abstract “Eastern mysticism.” The religious concepts and values—the conceptions of transcendent realities, the rewards and punishments, the ethical norms—within these subtraditions may not remain constant but change throughout history. There are variations and exceptions in every religious tradition. Different mystical groups within the same religion often disagree over doctrines and practices. (Buddhism first split over monastic rules, not doctrines.) Some doctrines may be common to most schools and may be “official” to, say, all of Buddhism, but the total configurations of all the beliefs of each school lead to significant differences and disputes. Nor is any mystical tradition “pure”: there are nonmystical influences and cross-fertilization from other religions.
Nevertheless, all religions have mystical traditions: any religious tradition can accommodate mystics to one degree or another. The influence of mystical experiences on religious doctrines is especially great in many Asian religions. But even with a mainstream view of the absolute otherness of God, the Abrahamic traditions all have had vibrant mystical traditions. Indeed, a scholar of Judaism, Brian Lancaster, can say, “There is effectively no such thing as ‘nonmystical Judaism’ ” (2005: 14). In the Abrahamic traditions, salvation is not a matter of mystical experiences, as in most Buddhist and Hindu traditions, but many Christians see mystics as living the Christian life to the fullest. Mystics also influence the doctrines of all traditions. Many are orthodox—in Christianity, 10 percent of medieval saints are mystics and another 10 percent are ascetics (Kroll & Bachrach 2005: 203). Indeed, a very strong case can be made that many Christian beliefs are merely mystical doctrines formulated dogmatically (Louth 1981: xi).
However, many mystics are in tension with the established tradition of their time: some react to the apparent worldliness of the faithful; some (e.g., women) present a challenge to the power or authority of those in charge or the accepted roles in society. Some, including Eckhart, were considered heretical—Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake. Many Protestants, following Martin Luther, oppose the very idea that God can be experienced directly or united with in any way, or that there is a spark of the divine in human beings, or that God can ever be immanent—God remains wholly transcendent. That is, even if there is a transcendent reality, it may not be open to any experience. Thus, most Protestants see all mysticism as inherently anti-Christian. Many have other complaints: they see mysticism as tainted by the heresy of Gnosticism, overstressing the nonrational in religion (Otto 1958: 22), pantheistic, self-denying, not sufficiently prophetic, or escapist rather than socially engaged. In the end, many theists agree with G. K. Chesterton’s disparagement of “mysticism” as “starting in mist, ending in schism, with an ‘I’ in the middle.”
In any case, mystical experiences are not tied to any particular set of beliefs or a particular religion but occur in all traditions. And some postexperience interpretation must be present even for the mystics themselves to understand the significance of the mystical experience.9 What is important here is that the experience alone does not determine its own interpretation. The experience itself is only one consideration: the doctrines and practices of a given mystic’s tradition all play a role. Mystical experiences may well affect the mystic’s worldview or ethos, but the process of seeing the significance of the experience occurs only outside of introvertive mystical experiences in a dualistic consciousness, whether mindful or not. Some interpretation must always be given to the experience to integrate it into the person’s life, whether the mystical experience occurs spontaneously or occurs to those who have been practicing in a particular tradition. An interpretation may in fact be ready-made by the mystic’s own tradition prior to the experiences, but those outside of any tradition will also need to work with their prior religious and philosophical beliefs to understand the significance of the experience.10
That mystics are aware of their tradition’s interpretation prior to their experiences raises the issue of what is more important in the final claim to mystical knowledge—the content of the mystical experiences themselves or the beliefs and values of a mystic’s tradition. Are introvertive mystical experiences noncognitive in that, even if an awareness of a transcendent reality is involved, the knowledge-claims themselves come only from other sources? That these experiences may adjust a mystic’s understanding of his or her tradition’s doctrines complicates the situation. In the end, mystical ideas of oneness, immutability, and so on figure in the generation of the doctrines of different religions, no matter how unmystical the orthodox doctrines might become if theory and spirituality grow apart. But disentangling mystical and unmystical influences may prove difficult. (Mysticism may also influence more purely philosophical circles, as in the case of later Platonism.)
All of this means that mystical experiences alone do not determine a mystic’s knowledge-claims. How an introvertive mystical experience fits into a worldview depends on what mystics decide its significance is while outside the experience, and this depends on religious, philosophical, and other considerations that encompass more than the experiences themselves. Thus, mystical knowledge will always have a conceptual element that mystics supply outside the experiences. This in turn means that ideas from the mystic’s tradition will always play a necessary role in how the mystical experience is seen and in what is taken to be mystical knowledge. Advaitins will have to offer reasons other than the depth-mystical experience itself to conclude that the world is “unreal” in any sense whatsoever, and theists will have to offer reasons for treating revelation or theistic mystical experiences as fundamental in interpreting the significance of the depth-mystical experience. But in all cases, factors outside mystical experiences themselves are a necessary part of the picture.
In sum, mystical experiences only in the context of a mystic’s encompassing mystical ways of life allegedly give knowledge. But even if mystical experiences affect the mystic’s worldview, judgments of the significance of a mystical experience nevertheless can occur only outside of introvertive mystical experiences in a dualistic state of consciousness when the experience itself becomes an object of intentional consciousness. In this way, the actual knowledge that is allegedly gained in the depth-mystical experience will involve elements of the mystic’s beliefs outside the experience itself. Mystical experiences are sometimes considered “preconceptual apprehensions,” but mystics claim to know what they experienced, and such knowledge occurs only outside the depth-mystical state. The experiences may be incorrigible, but the post-experience understanding of them is not. The depth-mystical experience remains constant (if constructivism is wrong), and it is the various understandings and valuations that become distinct to each mystical tradition that must be studied in religious studies.
Critics of mystical knowledge-claims point out that mystical experiences in different religious traditions are always taken as confirming the basic doctrines of the tradition that the experiencer was trained in. Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns in one empirical study exhibited similar physiological changes, but the Buddhist monks described their experiences in terms of selflessness while the Christian nuns described theirs as “a tangible sense of the closeness of God and a mingling with Him” (Newberg, d’Aquili, & Rause 2002: 7), just as their traditions dictate.11 This suggests that the experiencer’s cultural beliefs control their claims.12
This contention leads to “constructivism” in philosophy in response to Walter Stace’s “universal core” thesis that mystical experiences everywhere share some elements (see Katz 1978, 1983, 1992a, 2000; Gill 1984; also see Jones 1909). Constructivists prefer the name “contextualists,” but as noted below nonconstructivists can also emphasize the need to examine mystics in their cultural context to understand their knowledge-claims—it is the construction of all experiences by cultural concepts that nonconstructivists deny. Thus, “constructivism” is a better title. As the founder of constructivism, Steven Katz, bluntly puts it: “let me state the single epistemological assumption that has exercised my thinking and which has forced me to undertake the present investigation: There are NO pure (i.e., unmediated) experiences” (1978: 26). There can be no experience without the mediation of conceptualization (also see Proudfoot 1985: chap. 4; Bagger 1999: chap. 4). (Actually, Stace agreed with this: he too claimed that “there is no such thing as an absolutely pure experience without any interpretation at all” [1960a: 203]. But he believed that experience and conceptualizations can be separated [ibid.: 31–32, 71–76].13)
Constructivists need not deny that mystical experiences are genuine neurological events, nor need they accept attribution theory.14 The key idea for strong constructivists is that the alleged cognitive content of all mystical experiences is totally controlled by the experiencer’s prior religious beliefs. The experiences can have a huge emotional impact on the experiencer, and he or she may take them to be cognitive, but doctrines from the experiencer’s cultural background must be read in, precisely because the experience itself is void of any of its own cognitive content. That is, even if there is some amorphous reality that is experienced, that element too must be structured before it reaches awareness; thus, that element does not determine or even figure in the alleged cognitive content of the experience—only learned cultural beliefs do. (Katz and other strong constructionists do not claim that learned cultural constructs cause mystical experiences or explain why some people are mystics and other are not.) Thus, there is no “core” to the experience that is not penetrated by conceptual structuring. No part of even a depth-mystical experience is unstructured—i.e., untouched by language or concept. (Mediation must permeate the entire experience; otherwise, there would be a cultureless core to the experience that would give nonconstructivists an opening.) This means that a mystical experience can make no cognitive contribution to the belief-framework. No valid propositions can be generated on the basis of mystical experiences, and thus mystical experiences “logically cannot be the grounds for any final assertions about the nature or truth of any religious or philosophical position”—“mystical or more generally religious experience is irrelevant in establishing the truth or falsity of religion in general or any specific religion in particular” (Katz 1978: 22). In sum, nothing cognitively significant would remain if the doctrinal and cultural contents were removed from these experiences. So too, any changes in a mystic’s beliefs must come from nonexperiential cultural beliefs, not from any new mystical experiences.
The basis of this position is the view held virtually universally in philosophy today that all our experiences are conceptually structured. Constructivists contend that all conscious experiences, including mystical ones, must have an intentional object. There can be no “pure consciousness” event: there are no experiences when there is no phenomenal content in the mind—the “light” of awareness is turned “on” only when there are objects to illuminate. Following Franz Brentano, all consciousness is consciousness of something. Even emotional moods have some vague object. “Contentless consciousness” is an oxymoron: we can only be conscious if there is something there to be conscious of. There can be no content-free experience of “beingness.” Nor can our mind reflect reality “as it really is”—the mind only approaches reality through our own mental conceptual filters. That is, the concepts we create become part of a filter by which the mind processes information in every experience—nothing enters our awareness directly and unfiltered. There is no experience free of any structuring framework originating from an experiencer. In short, all experience is “theory-laden.” Sensory input is structured into perceptions of sense-objects by the concepts developed within the perceiver’s culture of what types of objects make up the world. And the same structuring process applies to all extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences. Thus, as Wilfrid Sellars said, “all awareness … is a linguistic affair” (1963: 160).
The roots of the claim lie in Immanuel Kant’s view on sense-perception: “intuitions without concepts are blind.” He too denied that there could be a “bare consciousness” devoid of content. Sense-perception is an active process of selecting and relating what is experienced to our concepts and beliefs rather than a passive registering of an external reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein expanded the different perceptions of Gestalt figures to all perception as “seeing as” (see Hick 1989: 140–42): all sense-perception is structured. For Kant, all people have certain a priori categories (such as time, space, substance, and causation) that structure the noumena that affect our sense organs into perceived phenomena, but the noumena lie forever outside of our knowledge: no unmediated, direct experience of the noumena is possible, and so no knowledge of a noumenon is possible.
Constructivists go beyond Kant: they focus on a layer of structuring beyond the a priori categories to a posteriori ones—our learned cultural beliefs and concepts. To them, all experiences have embedded conceptualizations specific to particular cultures. For this reason, strong constructivists argue that mystical experiences are not the same across cultures: each mystic’s experiences are conditioned by different elements, and so they are phenomenologically different from others’. There is no one universal depth-mystical experience or universal core to all mystical experiences: all mystical experiences have some phenomenal content, and each experience is unique to each experiencer.15 The context of each individual mystic determines all of his or her experiences. Thus, there can be no comparisons of experiences from different cultures and eras, even if cultures are uniform in each era. This means that there can be no foundation for any typology of mystical experiences or phenomenology of mysticism (Katz 1978: 56). (However, Katz cannot help but make distinctions between types of mystical experiences—e.g., between “absorptive” and “non-absorptive” experiences [ibid.: 41].)
Moderate constructivists (e.g., John Hick) insist that the external world still plays a role in constraining our creations—concepts structure all experiences, but reality surprises us and resists our expectations, and thus how we conceptualize an experience is not infinitely malleable. Culture might explain why religious visions are of Mary or Krishna, but it does not explain all of the experience—i.e., why some “sense of presence” is there to interpret in the first place. Nor does culture explain all of the content of mystical experiences: some content independent of the form is still part of the content of the experience. For moderate constructivists, this content can affect the experiencer’s beliefs—beliefs shape the form of the experiences, and the experiences in turn shape the beliefs—and thus the experiences may be cognitive of a transcendent reality. But, like all Kantians, they accept that direct knowledge of noumena is impossible.
Strong constructivists go further: all the belief-content of depth-mystical experiences is supplied solely by the mystic’s existing tradition. Transcendent realities contribute nothing, even if they exist and are in fact experienced (and Katz accepts that possibility [1988: 754]). In the case of sense-experience, moderate constructivists give the world a role in scientific and everyday knowledge-claims. For them, as for nonconstructivists, mystical experiences are also potentially cognitive. But strong constructivists deny, as do postmodernists, that the world ultimately plays any role at all: the world-in-itself, if there is such a reality, is amorphous, and so any configuration of concepts will do for coping with the world—we can make any “web of beliefs” fit by simply making enough adjustments to its parts—and thus in the final analysis reality does not constrain our creations. There is no role for any unknowable noumenon. Thus, any external “real” world in the end does not figure in determining our knowledge-claims; instead, our concepts exclusively shape our knowledge-claims. And when strong constructivism is combined with naturalism, the issue of a role for a transcendent reality does not even come up. Attention turns from experiences solely to what mystics write since “everything is text all the way down.”
Thus, strong constructivists go beyond claiming belief is one component in religious experiences to claiming it is the only component. The religious beliefs that mystics bring to their experiences do not merely contribute to their knowledge but are the only cognitive element. Strong constructivists thus assimilate knowledge-claims totally to the nonexperiential and the cultural. Mystical experiences are merely an intense feeling of our previous beliefs. They become, in the words of Robert Gimello, “simply the psychosomatic enhancement of religious beliefs and values” (in Katz 1978: 85). One postmodernist scholar questions whether memories of “mystical experiences” have any more transcendent “mystical content” than alien abductees’ “memories” of their alleged abductions have any genuine content (Sharf 1998). The conceptual framework of a religious tradition brought to the experience controls the content entirely. The cognitive content of any religious experience is thereby totally reduced to that belief-framework. There is no possibility of any independent cognitive input from a transcendent source. Mystical experiences thus cannot be sources of any potentially fresh insight for anyone’s system of belief. For the same reason, prior experiences did not shape the conceptual framework one brings to later religious experiences. Thus, for strong constructivists, mystical experiences cannot add anything at any point in the history of a mystical tradition to its beliefs or values or otherwise enter the cognitive picture.
Thus, to constructivists, depth-mystical experiences, contrary to the depth-mystics’ own claims of “empty” experiences, must have at least some conceptual content or else mystics would not be conscious. Beliefs and concepts penetrate the experiences themselves and are not applied after the fact in a separate act of interpretation. Meditation does not involve emptying the mind of a culture’s framework, thereby permitting new cognitive experiences, but simply helps the meditator to internalize fully the culture’s beliefs and values learned on the path. Thus, yoga properly understood is not an unconditioning or deconditioning of consciousness but rather a reconditioning of consciousness, i.e., a substituting of one form of conditioned consciousness for another (Katz 1978: 57).16 The Japanese Buddhist Dogen told his followers to cast aside their own mind and follow the teachings of the Buddha; to constructivists, this simply means indoctrination. Enlightenment is merely the final internalization of a religion’s framework of beliefs—the culmination of long periods of intense study, practice, and commitment to those specific beliefs and values.
Strong constructivism, in sum, rules out the possibility that mystics have any knowledge of a transcendent reality, even if mystics do experience such a reality: nonexperiential cultural belief-systems control everything about the experience’s cognitive content. Thus, there is no such thing as mystical knowledge in any real sense. Any experiential input from a transcendent source is totally shaped by our concepts and cannot provide any cognitive content about reality—there simply is no independent cognitive component in it. All mystical experiential claims thus can be dismissed as groundless: even if they are experiences of a transcendent reality, how could they be used to justify beliefs about that reality when the total cognitive content comes only from cultural beliefs?
In effect, strong constructivists go from the fact that our mind generates concepts to the conclusion that this is all there is to the cognitive content of mystical experiences. Mystics’ knowledge-claims are controlled totally by their concepts, and so in the end any experienced reality drops completely out of the epistemic picture. Moderate constructivists argue that the mind contributes to every genuine religious experience but that the transcendent realities do too. So too, there may be different degrees of mediation. To Bernard McGinn (1994, 1998), in Christian mysticism there is a direct mystical consciousness of God, but it is, in the theologian Bernard Lonegran’s phrase, a “mediated immediacy.” Thereby, the total cognitive content of religious experiences is not reducible to an experiencer’s prior doctrines, and mystical experiences of transcendent realities can offer some input constraining our knowledge-claims. Moderate constructivists argue that reality and the structuring we supply are inextricably mixed in our experiences and our knowledge, but strong constructivists conclude that concepts are simply our creations and have no connection to anything but the other concepts we create. Strong constructivists thus reduce the cognitive content of any mystical experience, while moderates do not.
Moderate constructivism can be applied without much objection to many types of religious experiences. That experiencers’ prior religious and nonreligious beliefs shape the experiences they undergo certainly seems to be the case with visions: experiencers do not claim to sense a vague, amorphous presence but to see Jesus or some other figure from their own religious tradition shaped by their beliefs. Their tradition seems to be the source of the form of what is experienced—Protestants do not have visions of Mary and Muslims never see Krishna. (Ramakrishna claimed to have had visions of Jesus and Muhammad, and the Dalai Lama of a smiling Mary at Fatima, but these also can be the result of prior beliefs.) Such numinous experiences are enough like sense-perceptions that they should be open to an analysis similar to ordinary sense-perceptions. Similarly, in the vast majority of cases, those who pray and hear a voice hear only confirmations of their prior beliefs. So too, extrovertive mystical experiences involve structured sensory content, and so constructivism may well apply to these experiences. That those extrovertive mystical experiences that involve seeing the world infused with love only seem to occur in traditions that treat God as love also suggests that these experiences are a cultural product. Mindfulness too seems amenable to constructivism: mystics can admit that the mind in mindful states, including enlightened ones, contains differentiated phenomena and thus may be structured by prior beliefs. The only exception would be the extreme case of “pure” mindfulness: there would be differentiable content but no structuring. Other mindful states’ content and structuring would depend in part on concepts and beliefs from each mystic’s tradition. So too with introvertive differentiated experiences: they may be structured with concepts from different religious and cultural traditions. The question is whether constructivism applies to depth-mystical experiences.17
Nonconstructivists in mystical studies deny that constructivism can be extended to the depth-mystical experience (see Almond 1982; Forman 1990, 1998b, 1999). They are usually mislabeled “perennialists” after “perennial philosophy.” But nonconstructivists need not embrace such a philosophy: they may accept Christianity, Islam, or some other concrete religious tradition as alone the best, or be naturalists who reject any transcendent realism. It is affirming that there is an unstructured type of mystical experience that defines nonconstructivism, not any particular interpretation of that experience or any one philosophical or religious set of beliefs or way of life. Conversely, perennial philosophers need not accept the nonconstructivist interpretation of mystical experiences. Even calling nonconstructivism “perennial psychology” (Robert Forman’s preferred term) may be misleading. So too, the label “essentialists” is not applicable: there is no one identical core to all types of mystical experiences, nor any core set of essential beliefs about what is experienced that all nonconstructivists must hold.18
Nonconstructivists deny even moderate constructivism with regard to the depth-mystical experience and contend that it is different from all other cognitive states: a state of consciousness free of all content can be inferred from the low-ramified, more phenomenological descriptions of the depth-experience, and the more highly ramified accounts can be seen as post facto interpretations. In general, nonconstructivists also tend to agree with mystics that the depth-mystical experience is cognitive. But as noted in chapter 1, the experience is not truly contentless. Obviously, mystics retain something of the sense of the experience after it is over, even if the sense can be expressed only in abstract terms—a sense of the direct awareness of beingness, consciousness, oneness, fundamentality, power, and immutability. But the experience is allegedly free of any objects or any differentiable content to structure or anything that could structure the experience and thus is empty of any content that a particular culture could supply or shape.
In addition, it is hard to claim that any two experiences with differentiated content are exactly the same, but if a truly “pure consciousness” event devoid of all diverse content does occur, then logically all such experiences must be phenomenally identical.19 That is, if there is an experience that is indeed truly empty of all differentiable content that could shape it, it must be, as a matter of simple logic, phenomenologically identical for all experiencers regardless of culture and era (assuming all human beings have basically the same type of mind in this regard). Thus, if mystics are correct, any depth-mystical experience must always be the same for all experiencers, regardless of one’s culture or beliefs, since there is no differentiable content during the experience itself that would distinguish one experience from another for different people. It is a truly culture-free and history-free experience. If so, there is one universal, unmediated experience unconditioned by linguistic or other structuring. (If there is such a common experience, this may say something about the nature of our mind, but it does not necessarily mean that the experience is veridical or in touch with a transcendent reality, as discussed in the next two chapters.)
Nonconstructivists may also argue (contra Kant) that the depth-mystical experience is an unmediated, direct experience of the noumenon that is experienced: any postexperience intentional object is the product of memory and a conceptual scheme, but the experience itself is a direct awareness of a noumenon. It is an experience of whatever it is that is experienced unmediated by any learned cultural concepts. There also is no reason to believe that any unlearned Kantian a priori categories could apply since there is no differentiated content involved. If the depth-mystical experience is in fact an experience of a reality, then this unmediated “noumenal experience” is knowledge by participation free of all learned concepts. The distinction between experience and conceptualizations returns only once dualistic consciousness returns after the experience, and the noumenon then becomes a phenomenon open to understanding and interpretation. (Whether pure mindfulness involves seeing the sensory world-in-itself is also an issue.)
Nonconstructivists can readily agree that the images and interpretations of the depth-mystical experience that mystics form in their postexperience dualistic consciousness are shaped by the beliefs of each particular mystic’s tradition that were learned as part of the training on the mystical path. That is, after the depth-experience the analytical mind returns and takes over with the cultural conceptions embedded in it. And what is taken to be mystical knowledge will no doubt be shaped by the tradition: the postexperience insight will be a combination of the experience and doctrines. Nonconstructivists may agree that what part is contributed by the experience and what part is contributed by the doctrine cannot be clearly separated in the postexperience mystical insight. But that conceptualizations influence knowledge does not mean that they must be present during the depth-mystical experience itself. Nonconstructivists can rightly ask, if this experience is in fact free of all differentiations—as the writings of even many theistic mystics clearly suggest—what is present to structure it? If meditation is a process of emptying the mind of conceptual content, as the mystical traditions claim, what would remain present in the end to structure any experience?
Thus, under strong constructivism, mystical experiences are no more cognitive than when Catholics see the face of Mary in a rusted refrigerator on a back porch. And many who think that strong constructivism is absurd in cases of sense-experience—to nonpostmodernists, reality obviously provides constraints on our everyday and scientific constructions—find strong constructivism attractive when it comes to mystical experiences.20 Strong constructivism neatly combines a popular philosophical position on sense-perception with a popular academic view on religion (the reduction of religion to belief-claims). Strong constructivism also reflects academics’ general love of all things linguistic and their unease over anything that even hints of the possibility of ineffability—in particular, philosophers see knowledge as a matter of propositions alone and are suspicious of any appeal to anything that is nonpropositional in nature.
Constructivists may also argue that experiencers typically report their experiences in terms of cultural stereotypes that do not really reflect the experiences themselves—e.g., experiencers may claim a “pure awareness” when they in fact had none. Thus, we cannot tell with any certainty whether the conceptualizations point to the same experience or to the same reality being experienced. It may be that any unusual experience will be described as “ineffable,” “paradoxical,” or “union with God.” Thus, little of the actual experiential content may be revealed even by the low-ramified descriptions. However, this claim is not very convincing: that might be true of “union with God,” but no culture has “pure consciousness” as a standard trope.21 Indeed, the only real reason strong constructivists can offer for their position on depth-mystical experiences is that it conforms with the claim that ordinary sense-experiences are structured. Their position is based on philosophy and not on any empirical investigation of mystical experiences. (If the depth-mystical experience cannot be analogized to sense-perception, as argued in the next chapter, their position is weakened further.) That there may be a cognitive state of consciousness without an intentional object is simply logically impossible to philosophers who address the situation with the presumption that all mental states are intentional. Constructivism is merely applied to mystical experiences without seriously examining the possibility that the depth-mystical experience may in fact be unique. This means that when constructivists claim that the depth-mystical experience must be structured, they are in effect making only an assumption concerning this experience based solely on other types of experience (as Katz acknowledges in the quotation given above [1978: 26]), not reaching a conclusion based on any empirical research on mystics (contra ibid.: 66).
Nonconstructivists in fact have a very strong case against both moderate and strong constructivism. First, there is empirical evidence in neuroscience against the constructivist interpretation of the depth-mystical sense-experiences: a “pure consciousness” event may in fact be neurologically possible (Hood 2006; Newberg, d’Aquili, & Rause 2002; also see Hölzel et al. 2011a: 545). Also, Zen meditation may enable practitioners to control the automatic cascade of conceptual association triggered by semantic stimuli (Pagnoni et al. 2008). There is also evidence that experiences in general occur slightly before both cognition and the translation of the awareness into language (Newberg & Waldman 2009: 75). Even a materialist who thinks the brain and mind are identical and that no transcendent reality is involved in a depth-mystical experience can argue against constructivism and for a genuine pure consciousness event: the monitoring activity of the mind continues in the absence of any representational processing; thus, when the mind is emptied of all sensory, conceptual, and ideational content, a lucid conscious states results (Peters 2000). The experiences are identical across cultures simply because of the common biology of the brain of all human beings.22
Second, an argument can be made by the position mystics are in. In ordinary perception, we do not experience a patch of colors and interpret it as a rug. There is only one act—seeing a rug. This may also apply to visions, most types of extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences, and mindful states of consciousness: interpretative elements may be present in the mind during these events. But in the case of the depth-mystical experience, the mind allegedly is empty of all differentiations, and it is only after the event that mystics can interpret its significance. Thus, depth-mystics clearly “perceive” the transcendent (i.e., have knowledge by identity or participation), but they cannot “grasp” it like an object until the experience is over—a transcendent reality shows itself, but what it is is only grasped after the experience. As Teresa of Avila put it, only after her mystical experience did she know that it was an “orison of union” with God—during the experience itself the soul sees and understands nothing and there are no words, but afterward the soul sees the truth clearly, not from a vision, but from the certitude God placed there (Interior Castle V.1.9). Only after the experience was she aware of anything; during the experience she was not. Similarly from Jiddhu Krishnamurti: “The brain is completely empty; all reaction had stopped; during all those hours, one was not aware of this emptiness but only in writing it is the thing known, but this knowledge is only descriptive and not real” (Lutyens 1983: 110–11).
Thus, if mystics are correct, two acts occur here, unlike in sense-perception: the depth-mystical event and a later act of conceptualization. Only depth-mystics are in a position to know both ordinary sense-perception and the depth-mystical experience, and they see a profound contrast in the natures of the two. For the depth-mystical experience, the later interpretation can be separated from the depth-experience itself. If so, the phenomenology of the experience must be distinguished from conceptualizations of it and beliefs about its ontic status made after the event, and we cannot infer that the latter must be informing the former. Believing after the fact that an experience was an experience of x does not logically require that the concept of x was active in the experience itself. (Any certainty that the experience itself apparently gives may also only be an aftereffect.) But being unaware of the content at the time does not mean there was no content. The mental structuring of sense-experience and most mystical experiences occurs in the same state of consciousness as the experience itself; thus, it is harder to see if there is conceptual structuring in the experience itself. But in the case of depth-mystical experiences, one must change one’s state of consciousness to see its significance. Thus, it is clearer to mystics that there is a difference between the experience and its conceptualization–, which leads to claims of ineffability. Only depth-mystics are in the unique position to see that there is in fact an “empty” experience.
Also consider this from Martin Buber. From his “own unforgettable experience,” he knew “well that there is a state in which the bonds of the personal nature of life seem to have fallen away from us and we experience an undivided unity” (1947: 24). But he adds:
But I do not know—what the soul willingly imagines and indeed is bound to imagine (mine too once did it)—that in this I had attained to a union with the primal being or the godhead. That is an exaggeration no longer permitted to the responsible understanding. Responsibly—that is, as a man holding his ground before reality—I can elicit from those experiences only that in them I reached an undifferentiated unity of myself without form or content. … In the honest and sober account of the responsible understanding this unity is nothing but the unity of this soul of mine, whose “ground” I have reached. (ibid.: 2425)
That “responsible understanding” was implicitly dictated by his Jewish background in which the gulf between God and creature is unbridgeable. But this understanding only came later and did not change his sense of the character of the experience itself in which he felt an “undivided unity” that he initially interpreted to be with the Godhead. His religious beliefs may have controlled his understanding but not the felt content of the experience itself.
If this is so, depth-mystical knowledge-claims are “based on experiences,” but there is both a direct, nonpropositional awareness and something inferred (the interpretation of the nature of what is experienced), each with its own epistemic status. This is not to suggest that there is such a thing as an “ineffable insight”—we must know what the alleged insight is, and thus an insight must be statable. That is, the alleged insights are always conceptually structured, even if depth-mystical experiences are not. But the insight is a postexperience product of two components: the depth-mystical experience and particular doctrines. Mystical “emptying,” “unknowing,” or “forgetting” still remains a process of deconditioning consciousness, not reconditioning it with other concepts. And even if the experience is free of any conceptualizations, it can still be a fresh awareness with cognitive import if some reality is in fact involved.
Nonconstructivists can also point out that the content of mystical experiences often comes as a surprise or even a shock to trained mystics—the expectations shaped by their teaching do not control the experience. To Thomas Merton, the experience is a “flat contradiction of all the soul imagined of God” (2003: 75). This is not what would be expected if their doctrines controlled the content of the experience but instead strongly indicates their lack of control.23 Nor can the idea that mystical experiences are only an intense emotional feeling of doctrines be at all applicable. So too, the young may have no words for their mystical experiences and only learn them later (Barnard 1997). Similarly, some extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences occur spontaneously to people with no mystical training or no religious background. This often stuns and confuses the experiencers—they have entered territory that they did not know existed. They may have no words to describe the novel event and may use familiar terms from their culture simply because they have no others, but there is no reason other than mere fiat to believe those terms permeated their initial experience. This unexpected event can radically alter the experiencers’ worldview, expanding their sense of what is real. It can also alter their values and can lead the nonreligious to adopt a religious way of life. Simone Weil is an example: she was an agnostic Marxist from a Jewish family who resisted the mystical experiences she was having but ended up converting to Christianity. The experiences occurred despite her Marxist beliefs, and those beliefs did not control her understanding or evaluation of the experiences.
The fact that mystics are sometimes heretical is also important. Visionaries, on the other hand, are more rarely heretical. Constructivists cannot handle heresy easily. For example, some of Meister Eckhart’s teachings were declared to be tainted by the “stain of heresy” or to be “evil sounding and very rash and suspect of heresy.” Even if his teachings can now be interpreted to be orthodox, it is still very hard to claim that the orthodox doctrines of his time controlled his teachings. His disciples, such as Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso, were more orthodox in their writings.
Moreover, the heavy-handed interpretations that Shankara gives Upanishadic passages and the imaginative “mystical interpretations” that Eckhart gives biblical passages suggest that it is more likely that mystics interpret their tradition’s authoritative revealed texts to fit what they have experienced rather than vice versa. Eckhart had no problem finding biblical passages he could interpret symbolically to illustrate his claims, but this does not mean that he got those positions from the Bible. Shankara had to interpret Upanishadic passages that conflicted with his nondualism as being only of “indirect meaning” to lead the listeners toward the truth, while those that supported his system were seen of “direct meaning.” In short, Shankara justified his system with the supposedly revealed Upanishads, but he interpreted the Upanishads to fit his system. This suggests that his own mystical system was his ultimate source of justification, not the Vedas, and his system was informed by mystical experiences. (He also had to give strained interpretations to the Brahma-sutras and the Bhagavad-gita to try to make them fit his system, including amending the former text.) That Vedantins of a non-Advaita stripe, such as Ramanuja and the dualist Madhva, interpret the same passages differently further suggests that the revealed texts are not controlling their positions.
Thus, mystical experiences may radically modify mystics’ own understanding of their tradition’s doctrines: mystics may use the same language and doctrines as before but now mean quite different things (as discussed in chapter 6). Even mystics who are conservative and trying to conform their understanding to orthodoxy thus may end up challenging the established understanding.24 This in turn may also lead to modifying or transforming the tradition’s orthodox doctrines for all followers, as Hasidism did. As Gershom Scholem says, “the mystic speaks the language of tradition, but at the same time deeply transforms it, giving old terms a new meaning and producing new ones characterized by their strange quality and by their emotional appeal” (1967: 9). There is a “dialectic” relation between the mystic and the tradition (ibid.: 13). Mystical traditions of one religion may also influence other religions’, as Jewish mysticism influenced early Sufism (which in turn later influenced medieval Kabbalists).
None of these points suggest that mystical experiences are as “conservative” as Katz argues (1983: 3–60).25 Indeed, nonconstructivists appear to have the overall stronger case. However, one basic problem forecloses any definitive resolution: all there can ever be are later accounts of what occurred during a depth-experience. All experiences are private, and mystics can only give us a postexperience depiction of the depth-mystical experience. All such depictions can occur only outside that experience in a different state of consciousness, and thus mystics cannot present us with a depiction of the depth-mystical experience free of their particular conceptual commitments. That is, to communicate, mystics will have to be in a state of consciousness where they can utilize the differentiations of language, and they will use whatever conceptual scheme they have adopted, and this is all we will ever have. To use an analogy: in mystics’ reports, we are presented with various colored lights without being able to examine the light source first hand (Dasgupta 1971: 68–69). The lights may be one white light with various colored coverings (the nonconstructivist position of a content-free depth-mystical experience, with different interpretations applied after the experience is over), or the lights themselves may be colored (the constructivist position of concepts being embedded in the experience itself)—but all we can ever see from the outside are the colored lights, and by themselves these cannot resolve the issue. So too, the mystics’ accounts will always be “colored” (conceptualized), and thus we are unable to observe the source itself directly to resolve the issue. Thus, our decision on the question of constructivism will have to be on other grounds.
Nonconstructivists conclude that there is a common experience based on the low-ramified descriptions from mystical accounts from around the world.26 They must also reject a bedrock principle of modern philosophy—that all experiences are permeated by conceptualizing. But they operate with the premise that mystics are in a privileged position for the issue of whether the depth-mystical experience is free of intentional content, and so nonmystics should accept their word that there is an experience free of all conceptual and other differentiated elements. Actual experience trumps theory. Constructivists counter that people may well misconstrue their own experiences and that constructivism fits better with the generally accepted philosophical view of the nature of sense-experience. Thus, they think that the constructivist reduction of the cognitive content of the depth-experience to prior beliefs is the best available explanation.
But the assumption that our linguistic concepts penetrate our normal sense-experiences is actually open to question. Sallie King points out that one’s first drink of coffee may be “mediated by cultural factors and expectations,” but she rightly asks, how do these relate to the first taste itself? How is this experience produced by the pre-existing context of tradition (1988: 264)? We know the label “taste of coffee” applies, but how does that label affect the actual experience? Or consider Benjamin Lee Whorf’s claim that perceptions differ between speakers of unrelated languages because all observation is theory-laden (1956: 212–13). Merely because the traditional language of the Hopi Indians classifies all “flying things” together with one term does not mean that they cannot distinguish airplanes, pilots, and insects. And the issue of whether there is a nonconceptual element to ordinary sense-perception has recently been revived (Gunther 2003). Consider Ptolemy and Copernicus viewing a sunset: they differed radically about what occurs in a sunset, but whether they actually experienced a sunset differently is another question—how can their highly ramified concepts affect their perceptions when we cannot experience that the earth is turning? Even Katz exempts experiences on “the most brutish, infantile, and sensate levels” (1988: 755). That admission opens the door to there being other types of unstructured experiences.
In light of considerations such as these, the constructivists’ case is severely weakened. If mystics sense a difference in epistemic character between the ordinary state of consciousness and the “empty” depth-mystical experience, then the mystics’ accounts of their own experiences are at least prima facie evidence against constructivism and in favor of the idea that the depth-mystical experience is in fact a state of consciousness free of all differentiable content. Nonconstructivists rightly defer to the mystics here: only mystics are aware of both differentiated experiences and the depth-mystical experience, and they claim the latter is radically different in type. All experiencers are in a privileged position for the phenomenology of their own experiences (but not for their evaluations of the experiences’ cognitive status, as discussed in the next chapter). This applies equally to mystics. If mystics sense differentiated phenomena after the depth-experience and are aware that those were not present during the depth-experience, we should accept it.
One may also ask how constructivists know that an “empty” state of consciousness is impossible for human beings the way we are constructed (Katz 1978: 59). Can philosophers legislate what is possible (Evans 1989)? A state of consciousness empty of content certainly is not logically impossible. Constructivists must also counter the empirical neurological studies suggesting the possibility of a “pure consciousness” noted above. These studies do not show that these experiences are actually structured with differences in structuring from each culture being irrelevant but that the experiences are structure-free. However, constructivists do not rely on any empirical evidence at all. Indeed, constructivists are not making empirically based claims at all (contra Katz 1978: 66) but simply uncritically applying a principle devised for one type of experience to other experiences. By doing so, they are putting an a priori limit on what is logically possible, and such reasoning is out of place in a science-based culture. Nonmystics simply are not in a position to deny that such empty experiences can occur.
In addition, even in relying on mystical texts alone, constructivists must reject much of what Asian and Western mystics actually say: they must dismiss accounts by mystics themselves that entail that some mystical experiences are empty of differentiable content, and they must also dismiss any talk of “forgetting” or “unknowing” as obviously wrong. But since constructivists apply their principle—their “single epistemological assumption” that there are no unmediated experiences (Katz 1978: 26)—in advance of any actual study, no amount of mystics’ accounts will ever convince constructivists they are wrong: with the constructivists’ strategy, nothing mystics could say could provide counter-evidence to constructivism even in principle since whatever mystics say after their experiences will reflect their tradition’s doctrines, and constructivists will automatically take this as evidence for their conclusion that was already predetermined by their prior assumption. It would also not be empirical for constructivists to argue that certain mystical reports must be false merely on the a priori ground that no experience in principle can be free of content. Even if constructivists had depth-mystical experiences themselves, the transitional state back to ordinary consciousness will be filled with content from their beliefs and emotions, and constructionists may well misconstrue the situation, seeing the beliefs as permeating the depth-mystical experience itself. Thus, constructivism applied to the depth-mystical experience ends up being unfalsifiable in practice, whether by analyzing texts or even by having a depth-mystical experience itself.
Constructivists correctly point out that there is no one abstract “mysticism” or one common mystical tradition spanning all cultures, but instead a variety of more specific mystical systems—in fact, more than one even within each religious tradition. Mysticism is not identical from culture to culture or era to era. This diversity, however, does not support constructivism over nonconstructivism: nonconstructivists have no problem agreeing that there are genuinely different mystical traditions—they merely argue that this diversity only reflects the diversity of the interpretations that mystics apply after the depth-mystical experience is over. That is, mystics do bring their cultural beliefs and values to their experiences, and these do influence their own later understanding of their own experiences, but this does not mean that the concepts must be active during the experiences themselves. There still can be one common depth-mystical experience that is independent of culture: the diversity of interpretations only reflects the diversity of the metaphysics of the world’s different religious traditions applied after the experience, not differences within depth-experiences themselves, and this diversity of concrete accounts that mystics employ to understand their experiences must be studied rather than claims about some abstract “mysticism” being advanced. Nonconstructivists thus can equally affirm the need to study mystics in context to understand mystical knowledge-claims. They can accept Katz’s “plea” for the recognition of differences (1978: 25)—they only insist that the differences lie in the postexperience doctrines and values of different ways of life.
In sum, the importance of context can be affirmed by nonconstructivists without imposing what becomes in this context a dogma of modern philosophy onto the depth-mystical experience. Contrary to what constructivists claim, nonconstructivists are not committed to the position that all mysticism is ultimately the same: different mystical knowledge-claims contain different conceptual elements that genuinely distinguish the claims of different traditions. Thus, mystical traditions remain different even if all depth-mystical experiences are the same. Nonconstructivism is also consistent with different positions on the relation of mystical traditions—constructing a perennial philosophy, accepting one mystical tradition as the best, accepting a relativism of all existing mystical traditions, or rejecting all mystical knowledge-claims in favor of naturalism.
The dispute thus comes down to whether we give more weight to what the mystics say or to what philosophers say about the nature of other experiences. In the end, whether one subscribes to extending constructivism to depth-mystical experiences may depend more on whether one has a prior commitment to reducing mysticism than anything inherent in the depth-mystical experience itself. But it must be said that constructivists do not present a strong case. Their case is built only on imposing philosophical ideas onto mysticism that were developed for other types of experiences, not studying mystics first and then devising a theory—they had their conclusion already made before they turned to mysticism. Nor is their position the result of any firsthand mystical experiences. Thus, in the end they have no reason other than an argument based on other experiences to rule out the possibility of an event of an object-free consciousness. This is a very risky way to rule out the very possibility that mystics might have a genuine insight into the nature of reality.
Of the three philosophical approaches discussed here, two deny any special mystical experiences, and all three let doctrines negate the possibility that mystical experiences might provide some unique, genuine knowledge of reality. Even if any “mystical experiences” remain after their analyses, the possibility that they might give knowledge is ruled out—any cognitive content can be supplied only by cultural sources uninfluenced by mystical experiences. However, none of the three philosophical positions prove to be convincing. At most, they show that we have to examine both the experience and the cultural contexts to understand mystical knowledge-claims, not that such claims must be ruled out a priori. Whether such claims can be shown to be true or false will be the subject of the next two chapters.