A religious way of life is not simply a matter of accepting a set of knowledge-claims or ideal values, but how one actually lives. Being religious cuts to one’s very identity regardless of the doctrines held or rituals followed. Doctrines and creeds may articulate the content of one’s faith, but they are not the substance of it. Nevertheless, mystical experiences allegedly do give knowledge about fundamental realities, thereby enabling one to live in accord with the way things really are. All classical mystical traditions contain explicit and implicit claims about the ultimate nature of both the world and persons that are meant to depict the way reality truly is. These doctrines articulate what one is prepared to accept if challenged.
Whether mystical claims are valid or justified is the central philosophical issue here. Are cognitive experiences limited to sense-experiences and self-awareness, or do mystical states of consciousness reveal something about the universe that our ordinary, baseline state of consciousness cannot?1 Do mystical experiences provide insights into reality, or are they purely “subjective” with no contact with any reality other than the brain? Do mystical insights trump claims made from ordinary experiences? Are they more certain than sense-experiences? Do mystical experiences offer any “objective” evidence for belief-claims, i.e., grounds that even opponents concede are a reason to accept certain beliefs (even though the opponents will not accept them as compelling)? Are extrovertive mystics justified in claiming that things in the everyday world are ontologically connected and that there is no ego? Are their experiences at least some empirical evidence supporting those claims? Are introvertive mystics justified in the implicit claim to have experienced a transcendent reality and in their explicit claims about the nature of what is experienced? How can a nonconceptual, objectless experience be cognitive? How do we know mystics are not having delusions? Do conflicting mystical doctrines mean that the experiences have no cognitive value? Are there grounds independent of mystical experiences that justify or refute their claims about what is real? Are some mystical claims epistemically superior to others? Strict evidentialists in philosophy object that if there is no clear evidence in favor of transcendent realities, then it is irrational to believe in God or another such reality. So are mystics rational in accepting their mystical claims? Are nonmystics rational in accepting mystical claims? (Whether natural explanations explain away mystical cognitive claims will be the subject of the next chapter; whether mystical claims are scientifically testable will be a subject in chapter 8.)
The most basic set of questions are these: (1) Are mystical experiences cognitive? That is, are there grounds to accept or to reject the basic claim that mystical experiences are veridical and thus tell us something of the nature of reality? Do introvertive experiences offer evidence of the existence of some transcendent reality? (2) Do mystical experiences favor one particular interpretation or one set of doctrines over competing claims? (3) Are mystics at least rational in accepting their experiences as veridical and as evidence for their particular tradition’s doctrines? (4) Are nonmystical rational in accepting mystical claims?
One important preliminary question is whether nonmystics are in a position to make any judgments about the veridicality of mystical experiences. Mystics certainly are privileged with regard to the phenomenology of their experience—anyone is so privileged with regard to his or her own experiences. But even mystics themselves can evaluate the cognitive import of their experiences only outside of introvertive experiences in a dualistic state of consciousness, whether mindful or not, when the mind is aware of differentiations and can consider different factors. So too, mystics themselves can assess the role their own mystical experiences play in justifying their claims only outside introvertive mystical experiences. And so too, the concrete alleged mystical insights into the true nature of reality arise as postexperience events occurring outside of introvertive states: mystics may have experienced a transcendent reality—it is only after introvertive experiences that mystics see “how things really are.” And all such evaluations involve more factors than mystical experiences alone. Even if (contra Kant and constructivists) mystics have direct and unmediated access to a noumenal reality free of any categories that generate phenomena and free of our cultural concepts structuring them, what cognitive significance they see in the experience arises only after the experience is over.
In such circumstances, the question of whether either mystical experiences lead to insights into realities lies outside the phenomenological accounts of the experiences themselves, and there is no reason that the mystics themselves should be privileged in the dualistic domain. Merely having a mystical experience is not grounds in itself for its own veridicality. Indeed, that a mystical experience is taken to provide an insight at all rather than producing a delusion depends on factors outside the experience: even a concept-free depth-experience is not necessarily cognitive—some people today who have this experience reject it as nothing but a delusion resulting from an empty mind. Thus, even mystics themselves need arguments for accepting their own experiences as cognitive as well as for their particular doctrines.
Nor is there a need to have mystical experiences to evaluate the basic philosophical claim that mystical experiences are cognitive: nonmystics can do the same weighing of factors that mystics must do. Nonmystics can readily accept that such experiences are genuine, unique neurological events and that they are cognitively significant and emotionally very powerful. Even naturalists and the spiritually blind can be sensitive to the possibility of transcendent realities and accept the sincerity of mystics. Thus, mystics and nonmystics are in the same position and meet on neutral ground on this epistemic issue of whether these experiences are cognitive and hence whether mystics therefore know more of reality than do nonmystics.
All of this means that nonmystics are not compelled to accept the mystics’ own assessment of their experiences. Even if mystics have unique experiences, they describe their experiences and make doctrinal claims only once they have returned to a “dualistic” state of consciousness, and in the end they are not in a privileged position with regard to the justification of their claims. Being a mystic does not necessarily qualify one to see the various issues involved in making claims to knowledge. In fact, the strong emotional impact that mystics often feel from these experiences may make it harder for them to examine their own experiences and claims critically and to avoid an unwarranted sense of certainty in their own particular interpretation of their experiences. Thus, a philosophical examination is especially important in this field.
That such evaluations occur in a dualistic state of consciousness is not elevating ordinary consciousness above mystical states in matters of cognition. It merely recognizes that mystics too make the judgment of the cognitive value of mystical insights in dualistic consciousness—one may still conclude that mystical experiences offer greater insights than ordinary consciousness. Nor do such judgments reduce mystical knowledge-claims to ordinary claims about natural objects made in intentional consciousness apart from contemplative states (although philosophers do routinely treat all mystics’ knowledge-claims as if they are propositions about sense-experience and ordinary objects in the universe). Evaluations might be different in certain altered states of consciousness, but even mystics must make their judgments about the status of those altered states in ordinary consciousness. That is, during an altered state of consciousness the experiences may be so overwhelming that one may be absolutely certain that one has experienced a reality or that one’s doctrines are true, but it is in the ordinary baseline state of consciousness that one is confronted by challenges to such claims and must evaluate alternatives, and thus such certainty cannot be maintained.
Thus, there does not appear to be any reason to deny nonmystics the right to evaluate the cognitive status of mystical experiences. Having an experience is one thing; evaluating its significance is another. That interpretations of these experiences conflict among mystics themselves only highlights the situation.2 Thus, mystics cannot simply say “Sorry, we’ve had the experiences, and you have not” when it comes to the cognitive status of their claims. The justification or warrant for the claim to have had a mystical experience may be internal to a person, but justification for the experience being cognitive or for a specific doctrine is external.
Thus, we can proceed, and the next question is what exactly mystics can claim to know. Do introvertive mystical experiences offer a credible case for mystics gaining knowledge of transcendent realities in general? Or of a transcendent reality of a specific nature? Mystics typically do not tentatively set forth what they believe they have experienced. But mystical experiences give knowledge only in the context of wider systems of thought, and mystics provide “thick” descriptions of what they know about reality in terms of their system, not “thin” phenomenological depictions of their experiences. That is, mystics give highly ramified depictions of what they know through their experiences, and certainty is a general characteristic of traditional mystics. Theistic mystics typically are not skeptical or agnostic about the existence of God or their experiences of him; rather, they have an unshakeable conviction. Traditional mystics in general tend to be naive realists about their claims, and if they are aware of competing interpretations they argue that such interpretations are clearly wrong. But to hold that one account gives a description of the content of a mystical experience without any interpretive elements will depend on wider ontic and conceptual commitments. And this leads to the question of what knowledge-claims the experiences actually justify.
Consider some examples. Does a depth-mystical experience confirm Advaita’s view of a fundamental consciousness that is the only reality in all phenomena, or does it confirm Samkhya’s view of multiple centers of consciousness? Or does it confirm no more than that there is a natural state of pure consciousness? Do differentiated introvertive experiences confirm the Buddhists’ typology of inner states, or the Samkhyas’? Do they conflict with the extrovertive Buddhist view that consciousness is a series of temporary conditioned events? Are theistic introvertive experiences of a trinitarian god of Christianity, or of the simpler divine unity of the one-person god of Judaism and Islam, or of the more immanent god of Ramanuja, or of just a generic personal “source”? Do depth-mystical experiences confirm any of these theistic views? How do we decide between accepting a Buddhist meditator’s discovery “based on their first-hand experiences” that there is no soul or a Christian or Hindu contemplative’s claim that through “repeated experiments” that were “verified” by their meditative experiences that in fact there is an eternal soul beneath the fleeting apparitions of the personality (McMahan 2008: 210)? Are all interpretations merely speculative “over-beliefs,” as William James called them (1958: 387–88), that are in no way justified by the experiences?
The lack of third-party checking of mystical claims is an issue here.3 When it comes to conflicting claims involving sense-experience, others can test the credibility of the evidence for our claims. No such procedure is possible for mystics’ claims: unlike sense-objects, no transcendent reality can be presented for checking by others, and any new mystical experiences would be taken only as confirming the experiencer’s own tradition’s claims. For this reason, naturalists rule out introvertive mystical experiences as possibly cognitive—what is experienced is deemed an hallucination since it cannot be seen, touched, or otherwise sensed by others. We cannot even tell if experiences by different persons have anything “objective” in common. Of course, no one’s inner experiences can be presented for others to see, but in the case of, say, astronomical observations, others can look into the telescope and confirm (if trained) an observation or disconfirm it.4 Masters in meditative traditions may have tests to determine if a practitioner is enlightened, but from the scientific point of view those tests are still indirect and subjective; at most they can confirm that an experience occurred, but they cannot confirm that the tradition’s doctrinal interpretation is correct. The judgment of whether this lack of third-party checking rules out the possibility of mystical experiences being cognitive depends on whether one believes the standards of science apply to all cognitive claims. Obviously, this is a basic conflict between naturalist and traditional religious points of view.5
This might be less of a problem if there were one agreed-on interpretation of the transcendent realities allegedly experienced from the different mystical traditions of the world, but there is no convergence of the diverse conflicting doctrines and none is in sight. So too, there do not appear to be any neutral criteria to adjudicate the disputes between mystical interpretations (as discussed below). There are theistic and nontheistic monisms and dualisms, each supported by different mystics. As just noted, Abrahamic theists are split. In theisms, there is also the problem that the depth-mystical experience has been interpreted as either an experience of God or the experience of only the root of the self. Of course, religious theorists within any tradition will be able to advance reasons to prefer one interpretation over others, but equally obviously members of other traditions with other basic beliefs will most likely remain unconvinced and will offer their own reasons for other positions.
It is because mystical experiences are not self-interpreting that they are open to being seen as supporting these diverse claims. However, this has one major consequence: even the mystics themselves are not justified by their experiences alone in accepting their mystical experiences as conclusive confirmation of their tradition’s doctrines. Shankara appealed to the Vedas. Martin Buber interpreted his experiences against orthodox Jewish beliefs. But can introvertive mystics at least offer their experience as some evidence that they have experienced some transcendent reality? They sense something as overwhelmingly more real when compared to what is experienced in ordinary consciousness. But two points present problems.
First, the mystics’ certainty is in their tradition’s doctrines, not in the abstract claim that some transcendent reality exists. Even if mystics do experience the same transcendent reality or the depth of the self, the fact remains that each mystic typically thinks that his or her doctrine (and thus doctrines in other traditions that concur with it) is the “best” or “least inadequate” understanding of the nature of what is experienced and that any conflicting doctrine is inadequate. Certainty that at least some transcendent reality was experienced might count as evidence if all mystics agreed on an interpretation of the nature of what was experienced. But the diversity of understandings precludes this. And if the mystics’ certitude here is misplaced, they may also be mistaken in the entailed claim that they experienced a transcendent reality. Even if an experiencer has no doubts about his or her interpretation, the resulting certainty is simply irrelevant to the cognitive issue when there are competing claims. No matter how powerful the experience may have been to an experiencer, this does not exempt the experiencer from the possibility of error concerning the status and nature of what was experienced. Like the prisoner from Plato’s cave who mistook the sun in all its dazzling splendor to be the author of the universe, mystics may make mistakes in their doctrinal conclusions.
Second, most mystics have an absolute and unflinching certainty after the event that the experiences convey the sense of something real—that what was experienced is not a delusion or dream. Any sense of certainty during the experience may be explained away by the lack of activity of the brain’s critical faculties, but the persisting sense of certainty after the experience must also be explained. For example, experiencers of drug-induced experiences can differentiate some obviously wrong beliefs (e.g., “The entire universe is pervaded by a strong odor of turpentine”) that seemed certain at the time of the experience from other certainties (Smith 2000: 65). Mystics appear certain that no experience could undercut the vivid sense of fundamental reality. However, some experiencers think their experiences are delusions and only result from natural states of the mind. And naturalists can still claim that mystics are mistaken: the experiences may well overwhelm mystics, but they are only a natural event resulting from the brain being emptied of all differentiable content. The character of the depth-mystical experience would be the same whether a transcendent reality or merely the natural mind is experienced (since it is empty of differentiated content), and it is the postexperience evaluation of what is experienced that determines the emotional impact the experience has on a mystic’s life.
As discussed in the next chapter, naturalists’ explanations do not refute transcendent explanations, but they offer a credible alternative to religious explanations. In such circumstances, how can mystics justify any claims to have experienced a transcendent reality without advancing an independent argument? Mystical experiences per se do not seem capable of resolving the naturalist versus transcendent dispute—i.e., that only sense-experience combined with reason can discover truths about reality versus seeing naturalism as grounded, in William James’s words, in the “baseless prejudice” of supposing that sensory awareness is the only vehicle of awareness of reality. Even if introvertive mystics have direct, unmediated access to a noumenon and the content of the experience has an impact on their later beliefs, how can they be certain that that is so? How can theistic mystics be sure, in the words of the “Letter of Private Counsel,” that they have “seen and felt … God as he is in himself”? The claim is about something real apart from the state of mind. When I have a pain, I may be certain I have a pain, but that is not a claim about reality apart from my state of mind or its causes. A mystical experience is self-validating as a state of consciousness, but how can mystics be certain about the state of affairs apart from their state of consciousness (e.g., its causes)?
Naturalists point to the diversity in the interpretations of mystical realities occurring in mystical traditions from around the world and throughout history as an indication that no reality is actually experienced. But that does not follow: it only shows that postexperience ideas conflict—competing interpretations do not rule out the possibility that introvertive mystics in fact experience some transcendent reality, or rule out that one account may be the best possible. At most, all that follows is that even mystics cannot know the nature of any transcendent reality that they experience. And this would mean that the mystics’ certainty in the highly ramified conceptions and doctrines that they advance to close off some mystery is misplaced: it may be that many—perhaps most or even all—mystics misinterpret their introvertive experiences and thus are wrong. There may be a common element to all introvertive mystical accounts—e.g., a profound sense of a direct, unmediated experience of a nondual and fundamental reality—that transcends cultures, but there is no simple, neutral account of the full nature of that reality.
Nor is there any empirical way to test mystics’ claims. Even if the experiences are reproducible by the same experiencer or by others through training, and even if meditation masters can devise tests to determine if a student has achieved enlightenment or have had the same experiences they have had, these procedures do not establish the veridicality of the experience—even some optical illusions, such as mirages, are public. Nor could this procedure test the ontic claims of the tradition’s account of transcendent realities against competing claims or against naturalists’ reductions. As already noted, tests for duplicating first-person experiences will test only their occurrence, not the resulting doctrines: since any transcendent realities cannot be presented for examination by others, the different interpretations cannot be tested in an intersubjective manner. Nor would any mystical experience falsify a doctrine, since the experiencer would always interpret the experience as confirming his or her tradition’s doctrines even if those doctrines must be modified or reinterpreted to accommodate the new alleged experiential insights. Nor do nonmystical experiences bear on claims about the beingness of the phenomenal natural realm or the possible existence of transcendent realities. In short, there is no empirical way to check mystical implicit or explicit ontic claims. Any support for such claims will have to come from other sources.
Thus, mystical doctrines may be revisable by nonexperiential sources, but there is no fresh experiential input to challenge them. In explaining new phenomena in science, there may be an initial diversity of conflicting theories, but scientists can test the interpretations against new experiential input and with generally agreed-on criteria for selecting the better theory; thus, eventually a consensus usually arises. But in mysticism there is no empirical way to test the interpretations, and no cross-cultural set of criteria for determining the best interpretation (as discussed below). Mystics do not engage the transcendent the way scientists engage the world: there are no experiments or other input from new experiences as time goes on. There are no new, genuinely novel depth-mystical experiences to challenge or correct previous mystical conceptions or otherwise test the various interpretations, but simply the same “pure consciousness” event empty of differentiated content recurring over and over again; if it is truly devoid of differentiable content, the experience remains the same each time for every experiencer throughout the world. So too for theistic mystical claims. The Abrahamic theists’ views of the nature of God have evolved over the last 3,000 years. Arguably, introvertive mystical experiences contributed to this process in the past. But these experiences can no longer offer fresh input for any future theological revisions, since theistic introvertive experiences offer no more than “the presence of a loving reality”—new information is not given in these experiences, as with alleged revelations. Mystics, in short, are not learning more about transcendent realities (if they exist) that could help resolve any of the disputes.
Moreover, if the different interpretations are all equally well grounded in the same experiences and are equally reasonable (as discussed below), the problem of competing interpretations rules out any simple empiricism in mysticism. Mystical knowledge may be grounded in experience, but the variety of understanding in the world’s mystical traditions shows that mystical knowledge cannot be deduced in a simple fashion from phenomenological descriptions of the experiences themselves. Experience does not dictate a knowledge-claim about the nature of what is experienced—even here knowledge-claims are always more than what can be justified by the experience alone. For example, how could Advaitins know by any experience that a transcendent consciousness is common to all persons and all worldly phenomena? They would have to offer more than their inner experiences to identify their self (atman) and the ground of reality (brahman) or to argue that Brahman is conscious and it alone is real. There is no agreed-on core of doctrines that is common to all or most mystical traditions about what is experienced in either type of introvertive experiences that is derivable from mystical experiences in a straightforward, empiricist manner. And even if all “theory” of what is experienced can be totally separated from the experience here (unlike with sense-experiences), the problem still remains: the “over-beliefs” remain essential to the understanding that the mystics themselves must have of their own experiences to lead their ways of life in accord with how they see reality. Thus, an element that goes beyond what the experiences warrant remains an irremovable part of mysticism.
Nevertheless, mysticism is often portrayed as a form of empiricism. Robert Nozick says that Aurobindo “is a mystic empiricist in that he builds on his mystic experiences, offering us descriptions of them, hypotheses that stick rather closely to them, and also bold speculations which reach far beyond the experiences themselves in order to place them in a coherent world picture” (in Phillips 1986: viii). “Empiricist” and “bold speculations” are not words normally found in the same sentence. The core claim of empiricism is that we do not have any knowledge beyond what is justified by experience alone—empiricists do not accept any alleged knowledge-claims that go beyond experience, let alone speculation. Buddhism too is often seen as a form of “radical empiricism.” B. Alan Wallace talks of a “return to empiricism” (2006: 37). He decries “mystical theology” and any “leap of faith that violates reason” (ibid.: 36). But he has no problem utilizing the Yogachara Buddhist concept of the alaya-vijnana—an alleged substrate “storehouse-consciousness” that precedes life and continues beyond death in which karmic seeds take root and develop; it is the ultimate ground state of consciousness, existing prior to all conceptual dichotomies, including subject/object and mind/matter (ibid.: 33–36). However, it is hard to see how we could know by any experience that this substrate existed prior to life and consciousness. How could any experiences prove that there is a reality that existed prior to the dichotomy of “mind” and “matter,” or that consciousness has no beginning but has existed since the beginning of the universe, or that consciousness will never end? Thus, the “storehouse consciousness” appears to be a bit of Buddhist theorizing: it is an attempt to answer the problem of how present actions can have karmic effects in future rebirths when everything under Buddhist metaphysics is momentary. Moreover, most Buddhists reject such a posit. In other Buddhist schools, there is no permanent continuum underlying the changing configurations of the parts constituting a person that can be found in any of our experiences. Nor does an individual’s constantly changing consciousness arise from a permanent reality. For example, the Vaibhashikas believe, in Wallace’s words, that only “brief, irreducible moments of consciousness are the absolute level of the mind” (2008: 121). In sum, positing a substrate consciousness is not the simple result of empiricism connected to meditative or other experiences, but is speculation. An empiricist would instead remain agnostic about claims beyond our experience.
That classical mystics justify their claims by appeal to their tradition’s authorities and doctrines and not their own experiences also conflicts with empiricism. Even Buddhist schools over time came to accept the Buddha’s testimony (shabda) as a means of valid knowledge, along with perception and inference.6 If mystics have to check their beliefs against the Vedas, the Bible, the Quran, or another revealed source to be sure what their experiences “confirm” and indeed that their experiences are veridical, then they are not empiricists, and ultimately they are in no better position than the rest of us for determining the actual nature of what was experienced since mystical experiences cannot tell us which authority we should accept as revealed, if any. The decision to accept something as a revelation typically comes prior to mystical enlightenment, and it is hard to see mystical experiences verifying the choice when mystics in different traditions make the same claim for their own scripture. That a mystic had prior beliefs when a mystical experience occurred does not absolutely rule out that experience as being cognitive or what the mystic claims it was, any more than the fact that scientists have prior beliefs invalidates their observations or rules out their theories as scientific knowledge. But it dictates caution in accepting the mystic’s claims. So too, that mystics appeal to scripture does not mean that mystical experiences are not cognitive, but it does mean that more factors are involved in determining what the insight actually is than the experiences alone.
“Empiricism” means more than simply “experientially based,” and knowledge-claims in mysticism are always more than what can be justified by the experience alone, as empiricism requires. Because there are equally well grounded competing mystical doctrines, there also cannot be any simple correspondence theory of truth between highly ramified claims and experiential facts. Nor can there be any foundation of solid, indisputable beliefs based on self-evident or indubitable premises concerning mystical experiences: the sense that one has experienced a transcendent reality may be incorrigible, but no “thick” description of what is experienced appears impervious to error. Nor do mystics offer tentative speculative hypotheses based on their experiences—they experience God, Brahman, or whatever. Even if the depth-mystical experience is a direct experience of a noumenal reality unmediated by any structuring, each mystic takes the same experiences as confirming his or her tradition’s doctrines (even if mystics must reinterpret those doctrines in light of the their experiences). But if this and other introvertive experiences are open to numerous competing understandings, they obviously are not self-interpreting or self-validating, even if mystics typically think their own experiences are.
Are there nonempirical grounds to establish the doctrines of a specific tradition or at least the more basic claim that introvertive mystics experience a transcendent reality? Some Christian philosophers and theologians today who subscribe to a reliabilist theory of knowledge invoke “the principle of credulity” under which we should accept experiencers’ claims until it can be shown that the experiences are based on some unreliable mechanism or it is overridden by other considerations that defeat the claims (e.g., Swinburne 1991: 303–18). In the case of transcendent experiences, a second requirement is that the existence of transcendent realities must not seem very unlikely on philosophical grounds. But as long as philosophers are split on the issue, it is hard to argue that one can only be rational if one concludes that it is very unlikely that such realities exist.
The principle goes back to Thomas Reid’s common-sense response to David Hume’s skepticism: our beliefs about the existence of the external world, the past, and other minds are not products of rational arguments or any inferences; rather, we simply have innate capacities that generate such beliefs; when these capacities are operating properly and under the appropriate circumstances, it is rational for us to accept the beliefs they produce. The skeptics’ unanswerable demands for certainty can simply be ignored. Thus, these thinkers reverse Cartesian doubt and argue that we should believe experiential claims unless we have good reason not to. And mystical experiences apparently do occur in physically and psychologically healthy persons without damaging their well-being (e.g., Hood 1997). Thus, this principle, they argue, gives a prima facie reason to believe what mystics claim to have experienced and shifts the burden of proof to the naturalists to show that all mystical experiences are somehow pathological and not reliable cognitive experiences (Franks Davis 1989: 101; also see Newberg, D’Aquili, & Rause 2002: 146–47).
But naturalists believe that these experiences result from purely natural neural mechanisms that even if functioning properly mislead experiencers into thinking they have realized something transcendent, and this ipso facto shows that these mechanisms are obviously unreliable for generating beliefs. At a minimum, the plausibility of natural explanations must undercut the epistemic confidence that mystics may have in their own experiences—how can they unreservedly commit themselves when there is a very real possibility of delusion? Why do someone’s mystical experiences typically just happen to “confirm” the doctrines that that person already holds and not another tradition’s? Again, mystics believe that it is some highly specified reality that is verified, not an abstract “ultimate reality” or “something more to reality.” Thus, the competing interpretations of either type of introvertive experiences raise a problem here: if mystics disagree among themselves about what is experienced, why should we treat these experiences as reliable sources of knowledge? If one interpretation is correct, then ipso facto all mystics who dispute that interpretation are wrong. This means that many mystics, perhaps the majority, misunderstand their own experiences.
One cannot brush aside the issue the way the theologian Richard Swinburne attempts by claiming that all transcendent concepts are merely different names for God (1991: 316)—e.g., Brahman is not merely a name for God since it is nonpersonal in nature, traditionally has no moral concerns for the phenomenal world and its creatures, and does not hear prayers or speak to beings. Swinburne also invokes a “principle of testimony” in order that the faithful can rely on the experiences of others (ibid.: 322–25). But experiencers can be misled by the phenomenology of mystical experiences and thus be honestly mistaken as to what is experienced; they may also automatically read in their tradition’s highly ramified concepts. Thus, we cannot rely on the reports of others to determine the truth of mystical knowledge-claims, no matter what we think of their character.
Also remember that many who undergo mystical experiences today see no cognitive significance in them at all—to them, they are merely exotic experiences stimulated by drugs or other artificial triggers that are subject to a naturalistic reduction.7 That mystics must weigh different types of mystical experiences against each other (as discussed in chapter 1) also means that no inevitable judgment of the cognitive significance of any one type of mystical experience is given.
All of this is very damaging: if many, if not most, mystics must be misunderstanding their experiences, this radically undercuts the alleged reliability of mystical experiences and thus the credibility of any mystical knowledge-claims. How can mystics commit to their own doctrines and traditions in that case? Agnosticism should result. Thus, critics see the principle of credulity as a “principle of gullibility” unless mystical claims can be justified as valid on other grounds—asserting that such claims should be accepted unless there are grounds to reject them is not enough. And finding such positive grounds is difficult. For example, as will be discussed in the next chapter, we cannot determine on neurological grounds alone whether a mystical experience is an authentic experience of a transcendent reality or whether experiencers merely mistakenly take it to be so. So too, the commonality of mystical experiences around the world does not necessarily mean they are veridical, but only that we are all constituted the same way with regard to these experiences. The sense of profundity and bliss and the great emotional impact are also irrelevant, as are any potential psychological or physical benefits of meditation—these could occur just as well if the cognitive claims are false and the experiences are the product only of the brain. Thus, to critics, even if the principle applies to sense-experience, there are no good reasons to believe that mystical experiences are not delusional, and thus the principle should not be applied to mystical experiences. And there is a division over whether mystical experiences are veridical that does not occur for sense-experiences; thus, the principle may apply to sense-experience but not obviously apply to mystical experiences. In sum, saying that we simply should assume they are veridical unless they are shown to be delusional does seem to be question-begging.
The naturalist view leads to a radical skepticism concerning all mystical claims. In addition, if all mystical knowledge-claims are equally well grounded in experiences, the principle of credulity leads to a paradoxical pluralism among mystics of equally acceptable conflicting knowledge-claims. That is, even if we use the principle to conclude that we should accept that introvertive mystics experience some transcendent reality, nevertheless the beliefs conflict over what that reality is taken to be. The distinction between interpretation and experience occurs here in a way it does not in sense-experience. At a minimum, this means that even if mystics are cognitive of some transcendent reality the principle of credulity is not a good reason by itself to assume the truth of the specific beliefs of any particular tradition. The cases for each tradition’s set of doctrinal knowledge-claims would have to be examined to see if there are good reasons to accept them.
Another popular argument for the veridicality of mystical experiences is based on an analogy to sense-perception. This is a reasonable approach, since sense-experience is considered the paradigm of epistemic reliability in our culture, principally because of intersubjective checkability. In addition, mystics do utilize sensory terminology—“seeing,” “feeling,” “touching,” “grasping,” “embracing,” “penetrating” a reality. Some philosophers attempt to show that it is just as reasonable to accept mystical claims as it is to accept claims based on sense-perceptions. That is, if we accept sense-experiences as reliable, then we should also equally accept mystical experiences as reliable (see Wainwright 1981: chap. 3; Swinburne 1991; Yandell 1993; Gellman 1997, 2001).
William Alston stresses this analogy, calling the direct, noninferential mystical experiences of God “mystical perceptions” (1991).8 However, he does not focus on the experiences themselves but on the belief-forming and evaluating practices connected to them—“doxastic practices.” (That mystics traditionally appeal to their tradition’s authorities and not to their own experiences is relevant here: mystics themselves judge their own experiences to be veridical by a social practice.) Alston’s position is that if a mystical doxastic practice as a whole can be shown to be epistemically similar to the practice of forming beliefs on the basis of sense-perceptions or memories, then it is just as rational to accept the former as it is to accept the latter. There is no noncircular way to justify the latter as a whole, since we must rely on other sense-perceptions or memories to confirm or disconfirm any claims based on them. Indeed, no doxastic practice can be justified by outside standards—there is no way to justify all of one’s justifiers. We must accept the general reliability of sensing and memory, and he argues that the same holds for some mystical practices. He concentrates on Christianity and argues that Christian mystical practices give Christian mystical beliefs the same epistemic status as beliefs formed from sense-experiences and have nothing to disqualify their rational acceptance. In sum, the Christian mystical practice is rationally engaged in because it is a socially established belief-forming practice that is not demonstrably unreliable or otherwise disqualified for rational acceptance (ibid.: 194). For Alston, both sense-experience and mystical experience involve a direct realism, i.e., the perceptions involve access to and a direct awareness of, its objects, although both, following Kant, are “shot through with ‘interpretation’ ” (ibid.: 27). In both cases, there is also no independent way of establishing the purported objects of the experience. Alston accepts both types of experience as reliable, but he admits that the mystical belief-forming practice does not have the same degree of reliability as sense-perception’s since there is nothing comparable in mystical practices to third-person checking of beliefs based on sense-perception (ibid.: 211–13, 238).
For the analogy to proceed, mystical experiences must be relevantly similar to sense-experiences. In practice, this has meant that philosophers have treated transcendent realities as ordinary intentional objects and mystical experiences as having a subject/object structure—positions that mystics reject. Mystical claims’ lack of public checkability also remains too significant for many philosophers to accept the analogy (see Gale 2005: 428–33 for standard objections). As noted, transcendent objects are not phenomenal objects that can be identified empirically, and thus claims about them are not checkable empirically.9 Moreover, sense-perception is universal and unavoidable—we cannot help but have the world impinge on us and must rely on sense-experience to survive. Mystical experiences, even if more common than usually supposed, are rare in comparison. Indeed, even for those who have had more than one mystical experience, they are rare compared to a lifetime of ordinary sense-experiences. This does not mean that mystical experiences cannot be veridical, but it does put them in a separate class from sense-experiences. Alston, however, dismisses any disanalogies to sense-experience—in particular, the lack of third-person checking—as an “epistemic imperialism” of importing standards from one doxastic practice into another (1991: 216). This makes Alston’s argument very frustrating: it leads quickly to the claim that mystical experiences must be as reliable as sense-experiences because any differences, no matter how substantive, can be dismissed as inapplicable. Thereby, mystical experiences of course end up being analogous to sense-experience since anything dissimilar is dismissed.
Another problem is that the world appears “religiously ambiguous,” as John Hick put it (1989:226), both between natural and religious explanations and among competing religious explanations, but it is not “physically ambiguous” when it comes to sense-experiences. There simply are more fundamental metaphysical choices in the interpretation of mystical experiences than for sense-experiences—mystical beliefs are more diverse and even incompatible on the very nature of what is experienced in a way that beliefs about the external world are not. Cultural beliefs may well shape our sense-experiences and produce diverse catalogs of the objects populating the world, but beliefs lead to variations in the understanding of the mystical experiential input in a way that they do not in sense-experience: identifying the theistic experience as, say, of a trinitarian god is not given in the experience itself in any straightforward way but depends on applying a large body of theological background beliefs. Interpretations of the reality involved in introvertive mystical experiences reflect a difference about the fundamental ontic nature of what is experienced, not merely a difference in classification as with sense-objects.
So too, we must trust the general reliability of sense-experience and memory in a way that we do not have to with mystical experiences. There is no alternative explanation for the sensory claims, as Alston admits (1991: 275), but not only is there a significant conflict of religious interpretations of the mystical experiences, the alternative of plausible naturalistic reductions of mystical experiences that reject them as cognitive must be taken into consideration. Overall, mystical experiences play a smaller role in the final determination of knowledge-claims than in the case of sense-experiences: mystical experiences cannot be reproduced in a third-person manner for checking mystical claims; because of this lack of testability, mystics are not as greatly constrained by their experiences in the theories they hold as in science. And if mystical claims in the end genuinely conflict, then, as noted above, most mystics are wrong, and thus mystical experiences, unlike sense-perception, are an unreliable basis for belief-formation. That is, it is not merely internal inconsistency within a way of life that would render a practice unreliable—the conflict between irreconcilable claims from different traditions in effect cancels the reliability of each claim produced within a mystical practice. This means that the conflict provides good reason to withhold assent to any doctrines of any tradition—and this applies to the mystics themselves: they should withhold assent to the doctrines of their own tradition. Their doctrines are as unreliable as the doctrines of other traditions even if some doctrines happen to be correct.
On the other side, those who think that the depth-mystical experience is unique epistemically as well as physiologically also reject the analogy to sense-perceptions as fundamentally misleading. The fundamental problem is that mystical experiences involve a knowledge by “participation” or “identity,” not anything like a “nonsensory sense-perception” since it has no object-like content to perceive. It is the exact opposite of being “confronted with an object or reality that appears to or is present to [mystics] in a nonsensory way” (contra Gellman 2001: 11). Nothing is presented like an object distinct from the mind, and to think of mystics as actually “perceiving God” is to get off on the wrong foot since it establishes a duality of experiencer and what is experienced that mystics deny. The states of consciousness permitting participatory knowledge make that knowledge unique. Transcendent realities allegedly are present in a way any phenomenon of the world is not. Perception requires some kind of intentional image, and even if introvertive mystics use the language of imagery, introvertive experiences do not involve any. Mystics use sensory terms taken from the everyday world, but this does not mean that any introvertive mystical experience is in any substantive way like an intentional sense-experience or that introvertive mystical insights are formed in a parallel way to sensory claims. Sensory terminology is the only one readily available for distinguishing a cognitive experience from “feeling” in an emotional sense or from imagination. Even advocates of the analogy to sense-experience admit that the analogy is only very loose (see Gale 2005: 432–33), and Alston in the end concedes that the analogy amounts to no more than that sense-experiences and mystical experiences are both “socially embedded.”
One standard argument in favor of accepting the doctrinal claims specific to one particular mystical tradition offers little help: the “argument from religious experience” for God’s existence and his attributes. Theists take mystical experiences as positive evidence, or even conclusive proof, that a transcendent source exists and has certain features. Christians see any argument for any transcendent source of the world as an argument for the existence of a Christian version of God (e.g., Franks Davis 1989; Alston 1991; also see Gellman 1997, 2001). For example, Keith Yandell (1993) presents an argument based on numinous experiences in favor of a creator god but must dismiss depth-mystical experiences as empty of cognitive value.10 The problem with such arguments is that their premises can never be shown to be definitively better grounded in experience or by reasons than their opponents’ counter-premises. All mystics appear to be in the same epistemic position. Thus, even if the argument from religious experience could counter natural reductions and establish that there is some transcendent reality, the religious beliefs of the nature of that reality still conflict—e.g., traditions denying a god have just as strong arguments for the nonexistence of any god as the fundamental reality as those traditions affirming a version of a personal creator God.11 Alleged refutations asserting that these arguments cannot establish anything (e.g., Martin 1990; Gale 1991) also present counterarguments that the religious believe they can refute but that do not begin to convince the nonreligious.
The basic problem is that we are simply not in a position to see if mystical experiences are delusions or veridical or what is their proper interpretation. Even having the experiences will not help when they can be easily interpreted to fit various religious and naturalist systems. Moreover, even if mystical experiences are taken as evidence for there being some transcendent reality, there is a further problem: seeing mystical experience as supporting the specific doctrines of any particular tradition requires dismissing at least some accounts from mystics in other traditions and arguing that those mystics really are experiencing something other than what they think. Religious theorists are just as willing as naturalists to tell mystics that they are mistaken about the content of their experiences. For example, Caroline Franks Davis has to twist the Advaitins’ and Buddhists’ experiences to claim that mystical experiences really support a “broad theism”—i.e., Shankara was really experiencing God although he explicitly argued that the nonpersonal Brahman alone is real, and the Buddha was totally unaware that he was experiencing a god.12 She ultimately claims that all mystics, despite what they say, really experience “a loving presence … with whom individuals can have a personal relationship” (1989: 191)—just as one would expect someone raised a Christian to see the true “common core” of the experience to be.13 But we cannot simply translate one tradition’s highly ramified concepts depicting a transcendent reality into another tradition’s equally highly ramified but different concepts, nor can we simply assume that all low-ramified concepts about the mystical experience support one chosen set of highly ramified theological concepts over other interpretations and then conclude that all mystical traditions really support one’s own tradition’s doctrines, although the outsiders themselves do not know it. Such arguments rest squarely in theological reasoning and are not based on mystical experiences themselves.
Nontheists also can just as easily apply the same contorted maneuvers to the claims of Christian mystics to conclude that a transcendent source is nonpersonal in nature or is only the mystic’s own transcendent self. Christians may reject the evidential support of mystical experience for nontheistic doctrines because the latter are “intertwined with bizarre and fantastic elements” (Gellman 2001: 37), but non-Christians could do the same with Christianity, starting with the core idea of a self-existent transcendent creator who was incarnated through an immaculate conception as a human being and yet who remained fully God while being fully human, who died as a ransom for all human beings for the sins committed by the original two human beings whom God created, and who then rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Overall, the vast majority of religious believers will end up seeing even the depth-mystical experience as objective support for the tradition they just happen to have been raised in. Mystics may have to revise their understanding of the tradition’s doctrines in light of the experiences, but they would still see these experiences as confirming their beliefs. In such circumstances, the depth-mystical experience remains neutral on the matter of which interpretation, if any, is valid.
Thus, religious theorists looking may easily end up arguing in circles—starting with one tradition’s ideas, then interpreting the mystical writings of the world to fit those ideas, and finally concluding that all mystical experiences are objective confirmations of those ideas. But if mystical experiences are open to what mystics in different traditions depict them as, no one religious framework of highly ramified concepts and theories can be imposed on the experiences’ actual content based only on considerations of mystical experiences themselves. Even ignoring such contentious issues as whether what is experienced in introvertive mystical experiences is personal or nonpersonal in nature, what is experienced may not justify any theological doctrinal elaborations. Certainly the traditional “omni’s” of a theistic god—omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence—cannot be justified by any experience.14 The experiences may overwhelm mystics, and what mystics encounter may seem to them to be the most powerful reality that a human being could possibly experience. Thus, they might infer that what is experienced has the maximum amount of whatever a particular tradition values, but it hard to see how those qualities could be experienced. How we could know from any experience that the reality is actually all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good? Or that it has infinite power, knowledge, and goodness? It is too facile for Swinburne to claim that believers who feel the presence of God or hear a voice or recognize God by some “sixth sense” can know that God is an infinite or all-powerful being (1991: 318–19)—that mystics enter an experience with a prior belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent reality does not give them any special ability that other mystics lack to discern such a reality.15 Basic theological problems such as whether a reality can have all three attributes or how any loving god can be the ground of a world with so much natural suffering are irrelevant to what mystics experience. In addition, the utter simplicity of the depth-mystical experience presents problems for theologians. It is not at all clear how a mystic could know from a mystical experience that the reality experienced is a creator or designer or that the designer must be the same as the ontic source of the world. Theologians also have the problem that if what is experienced is timeless (i.e., existing outside of the realm of time), how could it know temporal matters or act in time at all? Mystics also have the sense that the transcendent reality is immutable and thus cannot be affected by anything temporal such as the act of prayer. Nonmystical theologians may prefer a god with more personality and the ability to act in the world. So too, what mystics experience may seem to be the source of our reality and make them feel secure in the world, but how can they tell it is the source of all of the universe or does not have a further source of its own being that was not experienced? Of course, theologians may simply equate whatever mystics experience with their theological version of a transcendent source and then jump quickly to seeing all mystical experiences as support for their full theological conceptions without seriously considering or perhaps even seeing other possible options.
And again, the diversity of religious doctrines presents a grave problem even for those who reject naturalistic reductions of mystical experiences. Of course, believers in each tradition will be confident that they are right and any conflicting beliefs are wrong, and they will try to show that their interpretation is superior to that of other traditions. But such arguments will have to be based on grounds other than the mystical experiences themselves. And even if there are theological arguments for preferring one religious interpretation over others, the important point here is that mystical experiences will not be evidence for one set of doctrines over another. The experiences can be added to a “cumulative case” that incorporates revelations, natural theology, and philosophical arguments for a “best available explanation” argument for a particular religion’s doctrines. But the same mystical experiences can be incorporated into a cumulative case for any tradition. The experience is not self-interpreting but is interpreted in light of the other elements of the case. In this way, the experiences add no weight for one cumulative case against those of other traditions since they give the same empirical weight to all. Thus, the experiences themselves do not help determine the best available explanation.
If transcendent realities are truly unknowable, then mystics would not even know they exist—we may make a metaphysical posit, but nothing experiential would be involved. But mystics are certain that they have experienced some fundamental reality: they are aware of a reality and are not merely advancing theological posits. Nor do they infer the reality allegedly experienced: in “knowledge by participation,” transcendent realities are directly known in that sense. Nevertheless, while the experience of a transcendent reality may be direct (i.e., unmediated) and not inferred, the understanding of what is experienced is not—that is a matter of interpretation. In particular, the depth-mystical experience is empty of everything but a sense of a nondual consciousness; it is not possible to deduce in a simple way any highly-ramified concepts from it. More generally, the articulated knowledge-claims of mystical ways of life are only indirectly inferred. To give another example: Buddhists claim that enlightenment is the end of the cycle of rebirths, but do they experience merely the end of desires and infer the end of rebirths based on the theory that the cycle of rebirths is driven by desires grounded in root-ignorance? Buddhists may invoke reincarnation experiences and accept that this is an empirical basis for the claim that we survive death, but how could Buddhist contemplatives know on the basis of such experiences alone that they “have experientially probed the origins and evolution of the universe back to its divine source” (Wallace 2009: 195)? Why do mystics in the West speak of ending desires but say nothing of ending a cycle of rebirths? It is easy to understand that mystics would not normally see a difference between the experience and the interpretation imposed onto it, but the difference remains.
Thus, even if we grant that mystics are in touch with a transcendent reality, the experiences still may give no more than a general awareness of that reality. One may ask how one can know something exists without knowing at least some attributes. However, the flexibility of interpretation limits any claim to any specific knowledge of a transcendent reality. Mystics may know that something fundamental exists that makes our ordinary world seem less real, but what it is, beyond being “real,” “one,” “immutable,” or “beingness,” is not given but instead is open to different interpretations outside the introvertive mystical states of consciousness.16 As Thomas Merton puts it, one knows (i.e., has the experience of a transcendent reality) without knowing what one knows (2003: 60). No doctrine is given beyond being an experience of a profound reality or at best a general source of the self or of all phenomenal reality. Mystics too are left with mystery. Mystics in dualistic states of consciousness can remember that the depth-mystical experience is free of any sense of a surface-level ego and is filled with another reality, but the full nature of that reality is not given in the experience. As noted in the last chapter, an “ineffable insight” is a contradiction in terms (contra Kukla 2005): the awareness of a transcendent reality may be free of conceptions, but part of any postexperience insight must be statable to claim that something is known. A mystic cannot say “I have no idea what I experienced, but now I believe x because of it.” The minimum properties are statable (real, one, immutable), but what is the complete concrete insight? What exactly is the knowledge gained? A mystical theory based only on a core of descriptions common to all major mystical doctrines would at best be very minimal indeed and would not satisfy any classical mystics. Any full characterization of what is allegedly experienced is the result of a mixture of the experienced sense with elements supplied by a mystic’s tradition’s theory.
But this greatly limits the extent of any specific “mystical knowledge.” The experience has less cognitive content than mystics realize: even if the content is not totally ineffable, knowledge-claims are not determined by the experience itself. Consider the most basic questions: Is what is experienced the source of something phenomenal? If so, is it the source of all objective natural phenomena, or just the ground of consciousness or of the self? Is it nonpersonal, or do depth-mystics only experience the nonpersonal beingness of a personal reality? Is God the source of a nonpersonal beingness, or vice versa? Does consciousness underlie matter? Must there be one source to everything, or are matter and consciousness separate as in Samkhya? Ralph Hood (2002) argues that from phenomenology alone the depth-mystical experience involves a transcendent self—but is the transcendent self the separate individual self of Samkhya or the universal self of Advaita? Are there no individual selves or multiple ones? Is the experience just an intense awareness of the natural ground of the self or the of beingness of the world with no further ontic significance? Is the natural world a distinct reality in its own right, or, on the other extreme, is something transcendent the only reality? Is the transcendent source moral or morally indifferent? Does the sense of bliss in a mystical experience come from experiencing the infusion of a loving and benevolent reality, from a more neutral sense that everything is all right as is, from freedom from a sense of ego, or simply from the mind being undisturbed when it is empty of all intentional content? Does the fact that mystics may become more compassionate and loving indicate that they are in contact with a loving transcendent reality, or does it only indicate that they have ended all sense of self-importance and self-centeredness and do not feel alienated from the rest of the world? Do mystics only project a natural human feeling of love from themselves that results from the joy and selflessness they feel?
As discussed above, only outside the introvertive mystical mental states are mystics able to decide what sort of insight the experience is, and what is experienced is then one mental object among many even for mystics. But this means that mystics in the end are in the same epistemic situation as nonmystics when it comes to the nature of what was experienced, even though they have a larger experiential base from which to make their decisions about what is real. This problem occurs whether the mystic is enlightened or not and regardless of how mindful his or her consciousness is. This also raises the question of whether the mystics themselves after introvertive mystical experiences have a memory of a transcendent reality “as it really is.” Mystics such as Meister Eckhart say that transcendent realities cannot be “grasped by the mind”—or as the Pseudo-Dionysius says, that God is unknown even to those who have experienced him except in the moment of experience. This can lead to the position that such realities are not “knowable” since any statable knowledge-claim seems to make them into objects. But because transcendent realities cannot be known as objects distinct from the experiencer does not mean that they are not experiencable (contra Turner 1995).
This in turn leads to the issue raised earlier of whether any mystical theory with its theory-laden, highly ramified concepts actually “captures” the reality experienced, since there will always be a human-generated, nonexperiential element to any knowledge-claim. One of the possible interpretations may in fact be the best that is humanly possible, but in the absence of neutral criteria for adjudication, the presence of conflicting interpretations that have stood the test of time will remain a barrier to our knowing which one it is.17 The experiences themselves will not supply the answer. In our situation, all we can do is test whether each system is internally coherent and able to explain all the available phenomenological data. Introducing nonmystical considerations only leads to new disputes. Even if a consensus develops over time for one existing interpretation concerning what exactly is experienced in each type of introvertive experience or a new religious option arises in the future, how can we be sure it reflects what is real? Consensus does not mandate truth—after all, before Copernicus, there was a consensus in Europe concerning a Ptolemaic cosmology for over a thousand years. Here we have no way empirically to test the claims about transcendent realities. It may be that no set of doctrines is any better than any other with regard to transcendent realities—all are only our all-too-human attempts to comprehend what is beyond our ken.
At a minimum, this means that an appeal to more than the experiences themselves will always need to be made to justify any mystical knowledge-claim. As noted in the last chapter, religious and philosophical ideas from the mystic’s tradition thus will always play a necessary role both in how the mystical experience is construed and in the justifications of claims. Theists normally treat revelations and other numinous experiences as more fundamental in interpreting the significance of mystical experiences. Nontheists will offer their reasons for their positions. But in all cases, factors outside the experiences themselves remain a necessary part of the picture and will need their own separate justifications.
Mystics may insist that only they know reality’s true nature or that the proof of their claims lies within their own hearts and that their experiences confirm their beliefs. Nevertheless, the problem again is the competing answers to all the basic questions noted above: mystics cannot get around the fact that other mystics who apparently have had experiences of the same nature support conflicting views and have the same personal conviction of their claims being “self-evident” or “self-confirming.” Even if a mystic is certain that he or she has experienced a transcendent reality, this certainty cannot be shifted to certainty about his or her theory. Thus, a mystic cannot say “Just meditate—you will see that ours is the true knowledge” when making claims about the nature of what is experienced, since equally qualified mystics are making conflicting interpretations. The criteria to verify a mystical cognitive claim are not internal to it: any such internalist account fails in the face of equally well grounded competing claims. The certitude and finality that mystics feel from the experience is transferred to a version of their tradition’s beliefs, but this does not mean that their interpretation is necessarily true or part of the experience itself. Mystical claims are about the nature of the reality experienced, and no mystical experience can guarantee the insight it allegedly provides about that—there are no “self-confirming,” “self-authenticating,” or “self-verifying” doctrines about the nature of what is experienced, no matter how powerful the experiences giving rise to the doctrine are. In short, the conflicting interpretations preclude there being any experience-based claim to certainty about a particular tradition’s doctrines. Even accepting that the experience leads to an insight rather than a delusion requires a decision that the experience itself cannot determine. As noted earlier, experiences of internal states of the mind may be self-authenticating (e.g., the immediate, direct knowledge of having a headache or having a memory) and thus in need of no further justification or confirmation, but any ontic claims beyond those for the psychological state itself (e.g., the cause of a headache or whether a memory is correct) are in need of further justifications. Claims about introvertive mystical experiences cannot fall into the “self-authenticating” category when its ontic significance is open to such diverse interpretations even if one is correct.
Transcendent realities become intentional objects for the mystics themselves after the mystical experience when what was experienced is present to the dualistic mind, and the mind attaches a name to the event and stores it in memory. Thus, the memory of the experience differs in basic nature from the experience itself: what was experienced becomes an object of thought, and the memory necessarily involves a conceptualization of what was experienced. This memory is not any more self-authenticating about what is remembered than any other memory. No claims about the nature of the alleged reality are impervious to error or immune to challenge, even when the “knowledge by participation” of mystical experiences is involved. Unless strong constructivists are correct, the reality experienced has a say in such metaphysical matters by adding to the pool of experiences about which mystics make their doctrines, but what is experienced nevertheless does not determine one doctrine or one more general worldview over another. The interpretation and validation of the experience remain philosophical issues after the introvertive experiences are over, even for the mystics themselves.
In sum, there is a gap between experience and doctrine—between any experiential claim and any ontic claim about the reality experienced—that cannot be bridged even by the participatory knowledge of mystical experiences. No mystical experience carries its own interpretation. These experiences radically underdetermine different mystics’ metaphysics. Even if phenomenologists can abstract some common, universal “thin” core to each type of mystical experience on which all the experiencers could concur, this will not solve the problem: any minimalist descriptive account of the experience itself is free of reference to what is experienced and thus obviously cannot resolve the problem of which of the diverse “thick” interpretations of the nature of the reality experienced is best. No account with highly ramified concepts from any tradition of the nature of what is experienced can be said to be given in the experience itself. By bracketing the question of the nature of what is experienced, phenomenological accounts rule themselves out as being adjudicators of all such ontological claims.
Nor is there any philosophical or religious point of view that is neutral to the competing systems. Meditative techniques are doctrinally neutral. There is no agreed-on nonempirical set of criteria for adjudicating between competing interpretations, and nothing in history suggests that all theists and nontheists will ever agree on one. Even conceiving such a common ground is difficult. And even if such a set of criteria were agreed on, the application of the criteria would nevertheless turn on the competing underlying metaphysics from different traditions—i.e., theological or other metaphysical beliefs would determine how any neutral criteria are applied. Consider criteria often advanced in philosophy for the acceptability of scientific theories: empirical accuracy, ontic and mathematical simplicity, internal consistency, systematic organization, coherence with other accepted theories, scope, fruitfulness for new research and theories, familiarity, and the intuitive plausibility of the most basic elements of the theoretical framework. Some of these might be applicable to the mystical disputes, but with their broader metaphysical concerns (rather than empirically checkable claims), utilizing them would be harder to do. For example, all mystical systems claim to be of the same scope—comprehending all aspects of reality—even if not all traditions treat the same aspects as fundamentally real. Or consider simplicity: all will agree that Advaita is committed to the fewest number of ontologically irreducible elements—one—but this would not satisfy theists and others as adequate to the complexity of reality. Coherence with other religious and nonreligious beliefs is important, as the Martin Buber example noted in the last chapter attests, but this shifts the problem to justifying those other beliefs. (Also see Jones 1993: 41–46.)
Three presuppositions for this discussion are that mystical claims from different traditions can be compared, that they genuinely conflict, and that all mystics are in the same boat epistemically. Consider the first issue first.
Unless experiences can be compared in some way as potential sources of knowledge, they cannot be ranked. And unless mystical knowledge-claims are in some way about the same subject, they cannot agree or conflict. Constructivists argue not only that each mystical experience is unique (because of the unique structuring each experiencer brings to his or her experience), but also that each experience is unique in type—there is no meaningful cross-cultural commonality between them that would enable us to group them in different categories of “mystical experiences.” Context determines all elements of the experiences. This would preclude any ranking of types of mystical experiences since there are no types.18
Postmodernists in general deny a second type of comparison: between knowledge-claims from different cultural traditions. They go from the lack of any rock-solid foundations of knowledge to a thorough relativism of knowledge-claims, concepts, rationality, and justifications. They believe that cultural “webs of belief” determine what is accepted as “truth” or “knowledge” within a community. All justifications and reasoning are governed by standards internal to different cultures: there is no common language, conceptual framework, or set of norms of rationality that would permit measuring different cultural claims against each other. There can be no appeal to reasons or evidence across cultural lines, and so no cross-cultural comparisons are possible. Nor is any neutral standard transcending all cultures possible. Thus, no agreement or conflict of knowledge-claims is possible. In the end, the world drops out of the picture for adjudicating disputes, and we are left with only a collection of incommensurable views, some of which are useful for particular tasks and some not.
Postmodernism is influential in the humanities and the social sciences, but surprisingly not in the area from which it arose: philosophy. If nothing else, its basic claims end up being incoherent—e.g., the claim “there are no universally true knowledge-claims” is itself presented as a universally true knowledge-claim (see Jones 2009: chap. 3). Here, different types of mystical experiences do appear from cross-cultural study to be groupable into useful categories, and claims made about the experiences within those categories appear comparable. And there is no reason to rule out any such typology on the grounds that cross-cultural comparisons must be impossible: different terms in different cultures may be incommensurable, as with Ptolemy and Copernicus on what the term “sun” means, but this does not mean that they cannot be referring to the same reality. So too, we can use more abstract categories to group mystical terms from different cultures for comparison that would be acceptable to all, just as Ptolemy and Copernicus could agree that their term “the sun” refers to the same “celestial orb” even if they disagreed on its nature. Differences in interpretations do not mean that depth-mystics do not experience the same reality. So too, the introvertive theistic experiences must involve the same reality if they are veridical—or at least it is hard not to assume that there can be only one creator or only one sustainer god. In addition, extrovertive experiences involve the phenomenal world, and if they involve a sense of a transcendent source, that source is either one theistic god or one nonpersonal reality.
Thus, if any reality is involved in any of the types of mystical experiences, it is reasonable to assume that the same reality is involved in all the experiences of that category. Claims are also made of the same scope for each category—about the nature of the world, the self, or alleged transcendent realities. The presence of conceptualizations in knowledge-claims about transcendent realities does not require multiple referents, nor does it rule out that the claims may express insights any more than the role of concepts in scientific knowledge-claims rules out genuine knowledge in that field. The experiences themselves provide the commonality needed to make the claims within each category comparable cross-culturally, somewhat like the causal theory of reference would permit the comparison of competing theories in science. What is experienced cannot be presented for public viewing, but the experience itself is a “dubbing event”—i.e., whatever caused the experience in one person caused it in others even if interpretations differ radically. (The analogy breaks down if mystical experiences are not the product of a causal relation.) “Sense” and “reference” can therefore be distinguished here.
So it is reasonable to assume that mystical knowledge-claims can be compared cross-culturally. The next question is: do they really conflict or are they reconcilable? The basic controversy for extrovertive mysticism is over whether God is present or not, but the discussion here will be limited to the matter of introvertive mystical experiences. Prima facie, mystical claims do conflict: they are all about the same alleged realities (a transcendent self, the source of the world), and they are incompatible and so cannot all be true. Thus, they compete. If presented with a genuine conflict, mystics should reject competing claims from other traditions, just as classical mystics would reject naturalism. But it is often noted that mystics share a friendly camaraderie with mystics from other traditions. They may simply not want to dispute the proper interpretation of mystical experiences with friends. Or no matter how confident they are in their own doctrines, they may have less overall confidence in any human conceptualizations and so be less inclined to argue with others over them. Today they may become less dogmatic when they become aware of the epistemic problems connected to mystical claims or become more aware of the variety of viable mystical beliefs. Or they may not be overly concerned with doctrines. So too, being “selfless” may make them less confrontational in general.
But this does not negate the doctrinal differences or mean that mystics believe that doctrines do not matter or that all doctrines are really the same. For example, the Christian Thomas Merton, while valuing his Buddhist friends, placed all Asian mysticism within “the order of nature” and below theistic mysticism, although he believed that God is involved in all genuine mystical experiences. Classical mystics tended to see their own view as “correct” or “best” or “closest to the truth” or “least inadequate,” even if they denied that any descriptions of transcendent realities are possible and believed that there is more to a transcendent reality than they have experienced. And they contested other doctrines. Formal debates in India between schools included disputes on mystical doctrines. Many of the writings of such major Advaitins and Buddhists as Shankara and Nagarjuna are against other schools (including those within their own tradition) as they try to show how their own views are better and how the others are wrong.19 Shankara likened dualists who oppose him to deluded fools (Jones 2014c: 72). The Buddhist Aryadeva was supposedly killed by a disciple of another Buddhist he had just defeated in a debate (Jones 2011b: 187), and Shankara supposedly died from a curse from another teacher. In Japan, the great Zen master Dogen rejected the view that all religions teach the same thing in different forms as un-Buddhist. Also in Japan the Buddhist Nichiren called for the suppression of other Buddhist groups, and monks warred with each other. Tantric sects most often were hostile toward other Tantric sects. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim mystics typically did not believe in the soteriological efficacy of other traditions. Some Christian mystics also supported the Crusades and Inquisition. If the mystics’ claims were only about the phenomenology of the experiences themselves rather than about what is allegedly experienced, there would not be so much of a problem, but mysticism is not about these experiences but about aligning one’s life with the way things really are, and this makes doctrines about the nature of what was experienced central and the subject of sectarian disputes.
Some classical mystics have held that “all streams lead to the same ocean” (i.e., all mystical paths lead to the same goal) or, to quote Jalal al-din Rumi, that “the lamps are many, but the light is one” (i.e., all mystical teachings have the same content). In the modern West, these ideas were advanced by Neo-Vedanists beginning with Ramakrishna. This has led some philosophers and theologians today to argue that mystical knowledge-claims really do not conflict. One innovative solution is a “multiple realities” approach: theistic and nontheistic introvertive mystics experience different transcendent realities—theists experience a theistic god, and nontheists experience a nonpersonal beingness or a self. This goes part way toward reconciling competing claims. However, disputes about the attributes of the fundamental reality persist: theists still insist that, for example, Advaitins are wrong about the ultimate source of God and the phenomenal world being nonpersonal and the world being purposeless. Assuming there is only one transcendent reality and making depth-mystical experiences merely an experience of the beingness of God or the Godhead also leads to the same conflict over what properties are ultimately most basic. So too, if there is only one creator or sustainer god, different theistic traditions could still disagree over his attributes. So too, the relation of apparently multiple selves to one transcendent reality remains an issue.
Another modern attempt at reconciliation places all religious traditions in a “perennial philosophy” framework. Perennial philosophers handle the mystics’ apparently conflicting claims by accepting a pluralism of paths all leading to the same summit or different idioms expressing the same truth (Schuon 1975; Smith 1976; Nasr 1993).20 All religions are “true” in the sense that each religion is an effective means to experiencing the same transcendent reality, even if no specific doctrine is the final truth. Perennial philosophers argue that all traditions have distinct and unique “exoteric” shells but the same “esoteric” core, like a spectrum of colored lights arising from one common white light. They propose a metaphysical scheme with an unmoving Godhead at the center emanating spirit, minds, and lastly matter. They then interpret all religious doctrines in light of this scheme. Outside of perennial philosophy, the moderate constructivist John Hick (1989) proposed a “Copernican revolution” for the relation of religions, with all religious conceptions orbiting the “Real” in the center. This leads to a Kantian-inspired pluralism without the elaborate metaphysical overlay of perennial philosophy but having a similar effect. These thinkers argue that the Real is beyond all our categories and is experienced differently depending on the religious context of a particular person. All veridical religious experiences of the Real are “true,” but we cannot get behind the different “masks” of experience and know the Real-in-itself. Thus, the Real-in-itself is not personal or nonpersonal, moral or nonmoral, one or many, and so on—these masks are only categories imposed on it in different cultures. To use an analogy from science: we never know an electron-in-itself; an electron appears as a particle or as a wave depending on which experimental setup scientists employ; we can never see an electron as it is in itself, outside of our experiments; whatever it is in itself remains a mystery—it is not a particle or a wave, but something capable of manifesting these phenomena when we interact with it in different ways. Similarly, mystics experience the Real differently depending on their religious and philosophical beliefs, but the Real-in-itself remains a mystery. So is what happens to us after death. Thus, each classical mystic is wrong in believing that his or her view is better than others: all views are imperfect and dependent on human beliefs.
The root-metaphor for this position goes back to the Middle Eastern and Indian parable of a group of blind men who touch different parts of an elephant and mistakenly conclude from their limited perspectives that they know what an elephant is. In one common version, one man touches the elephant’s side and concludes it is a wall; a second man touches a tusk and concludes it must be a spear; a third feels the trunk and concludes it is a snake; a fourth touches a leg and concludes it must be a tree; a fifth man feels the elephant’s ear and the breeze it makes and concludes it is a fan; and a sixth man grasps the tail and concludes it is a rope. The observers laugh, and the men quarrel, each insisting that he alone is correct, and eventually fight. The moral of the parable is not that a transcendent reality has different parts that different mystics experience, but that mystics are wrong in drawing final conclusions about its true nature from their own direct experiences. Similarly, perennial philosophers and pluralists require all religious believers to admit that their formulations are wrong in some fundamental sense because they do not know the Real-in-itself. All depictions are penultimate at best. Like Kant’s noumena, the Real-in-itself is an unknowable mystery, and we have to accept the limited value of any formulation. Thus, those who argue for a pluralism as the proper epistemic relation between religious claims usually stress skepticism about doctrines and a radical ineffable mystery at the core of things.
Perennial philosophy and pluralism may satisfy modern liberal believers, but these approaches must revise traditional mysticism. A passage from early Theravada Buddhism represents classical mysticism: “There is one truth without a second. People, being confused on this point, claim there are many truths” (Sutta Nipata 884). Introvertive mystics believe they are experiencing a transcendent reality directly. Thus, there is less mystery than Kantians suppose, even if there is more to the transcendent reality than human beings are capable of handling. But there are no differentiated aspects of what is experienced in the “empty” depth-mystical experience (as with the elephant), and thus having direct access to a reality is a problem for any idea of pluralism. Equally important, mystics also have different soteriological goals with different paths and values—i.e., different paths leading to different summits—not just different conceptions of transcendent realities.21 It is hard to see theists as heading for the same goal as Buddhists. Like the Buddha, some may not speculate on what happens when the enlightened die, or all mystics may believe human conceptions cannot truly reflect transcendent realities, but they nevertheless all have particular ways of life that do not converge into one generic “mystical way of life.” So too, classical mystics may be willing to accept that their doctrines are only “partial truths” and not the complete truth, but they typically are not willing to accept that doctrines that conflict with theirs are equally true.
Overall, no one has advanced a successful way to get around the fact that the doctrines of the world religions conflict with each other in at least some core claims.22 There may be one common depth-mystical experience, and other experiences and aspects of mystical ways of life may fall into some helpful abstract categories (“transcendent realities,” “soteriological goals,” and so on), but there is no “concordant discord,” to cite the title of one of R. C. Zaehner’s books.
Thus, mystical knowledge-claims do appear to be incompatible and genuinely to conflict, not merely diverge. Conflicting and irreconcilable claims per se do not rule out one mystical system being better than others if there is a procedure to resolve the disputes in favor of one system. So can we justify one set of mystical doctrines as epistemically superior? How we justify any beliefs is itself a thorny issue in philosophy, but two possibilities can be quickly dismissed. First, even if there are cross-cultural standards of rationality or neutral experiential evidence, there still are different premises in different cultures and no agreement on how the standards and evidence should be utilized in arguments. Different traditions characterize problems and solutions differently. For example, taking historical events as valuable is integral to Jewish and Christian traditions, but that area of concern is screened out in traditional Indian mysticism, where escaping the cycle of rebirths is central. Beliefs ground the ways of life, and the beliefs on what is real conflict. For example, for Christians who take the incarnation of Christ as the central event of history (e.g., Zaehner 1970: 31), any view that ignores that in characterizing our situation is not being objective. Second, the religious may see revelations as exempt from all the problems of human reasoning and experiences. But the appeal to revelations presents its own issues: the very idea of accepting revelations as cognitive would itself have to be defended against naturalism; various revelations around the world themselves conflict, and there does not appear to be a neutral way of resolving this conflict or testing a revelation rather than relying ultimately on faith; accepting revelations involves relying on the experiences of others, unlike in mysticism where in principle each person can have his or her own experience; and reasons would have to be advanced for ruling out a tradition such as Buddhism that rejects all revelations.23
If we limit the question of justification to only whether there is a way within the resources of mysticism alone, is there a way to adjudicate one set of mystical beliefs as better or best? One proposed test is psychological well-being. But introvertive mystical experiences do not have a uniformly positive psychological effect on all people: not all who have had mystical experiences turn out healthier or live more effectively in the natural world. One can also have a depth-mystical experience without it affecting one’s psyche: if one is neurotic before, one may well remain neurotic afterward. So too, mystical experiences may have negative effects if they are spontaneous and unexpected: if one is not prepared for them, the shock can be disturbing. Meditation also can end up aggravating negative mental conditions and personality traits. And to naturalists, any positive effects are irrelevant to the question of insight: any positive character changes merely indicate that mystics believe they are in contact with a transcendent reality, not necessarily that they actually are.
Thus, psychological well-being fails as a test for the genuineness of mystical experience. William James proposed a similar pragmatic test for determining true mystical doctrines (1958: 368): if a mystical experience produces positive results in how one leads one’s life, then the experience is authentic and the way of life one follows is vindicated (and so the teachings leading to a positive life are correct). In short, the “truth” of one’s beliefs is shown by one’s life as a whole.24 The criterion goes back to the Bible: Jesus spoke of recognizing a false prophet by the fruits he bears (Matthew 7:15–20), and Paul spoke of the “harvest of the Spirit”—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22). Christian mystics have often used this criterion—e.g., Teresa of Avila said that one can tell if an experience comes from God or the Devil by its fruits in actions and personality (along with the vividness of the memory of the experience, conformity to Christian scripture, and confirmation by superiors). For her, humility and charity result from an authentic God-given experience. More recently, John Hick also made much of an ethical criterion and “saint-making” in his pluralism (1989: 316–42).
However, the “fruits” test has problems. As discussed in chapter 9, mystical experiences need not make a person moral or more socially active: while all enlightened mystics shift toward selflessness, not all enlightened mystics fill their newly found selflessness with a moral concern for others—the enlightened cannot be ego-centered, but they can exhibit a “holy indifference” to the welfare of others. In addition, positive actions toward others may simply reflect the doctrines and values of one’s own religion. This criterion was proposed by Christians and the specifics reflect traditional Christian values. Thus, it may end up being a criterion internal to only some traditions rather than a neutral criterion applicable across cultures. For example, some traditions do not value this-worldly concerns centrally. In Jainism, the ideal for the enlightened is to stop harming any creature and thus to take no actions at all, leading to their death by starvation: how is this proof that they are not enlightened or had no mystical experiences? Certainly not just because it conflicts with Christian values for an enlightened way of life. So too, most mystics try to conform to the orthodoxy of their tradition because they think their tradition is the best, and so the enlightened may simply follow their tradition’s values and factual beliefs that they have internalized. (But there are antinomian mystics in every tradition.) If so, we cannot see mystical experiences as validating one tradition’s doctrines. The nonreligious who unexpectedly have spontaneous mystical experiences may also only reflect the values of their cultures in their understanding. So too, emotional types of fruit—e.g., joy, calmness, equanimity—also can arise whether one has had a mystical experience or not and also whether a mystic has experienced a transcendent reality or not. That is, psychological or physiological well-being may result simply from the mind being emptied of worries and other stressful content by focusing solely on the present and not from an experience of a transcendent reality.
Thus, the “fruits” test cannot be seen as an independent test for any mystical doctrines. The criterion may be applied only in a question-begging way favoring one tradition’s values. Other traditions may propose other criteria for what are the best mystical doctrines that would favor their own traditions. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine one set of neutral criteria or procedures to determine one set of mystical doctrines as supreme that does not reflect the contingent values of one tradition or another. In the end, what is accepted as a true doctrine turns on theological criteria rather than the phenomenological content of the experiences themselves or any neutral criterion internal to the practice of mysticism generally.
If we accept that no set of mystical knowledge-claims can be established in any neutral way to be superior to others, we must accept that no mystical knowledge-claims can be proven in the sense that it would be irrational for anyone familiar with the issues of natural explanations and competing sets of mystical knowledge-claims to reject a set of such claims. But can we at least determine if it is rational for mystics themselves or for nonmystics to hold their doctrines based on mystical experiences?25 That is, can we lower the bar from trying to establish the truth of particular mystical doctrines or to convince others to accept one’s claims to merely establishing that it is rational to hold some mystical doctrines? This divides into two questions. Is it rational for mystics themselves to count their own experiences as evidence for the basic doctrines they hold?26 And is it rational for nonmystics to accept the mystical experiences of others as evidence for their tradition’s doctrines?
What exactly being “rational” is is a matter of debate. It used to be considered irrational in philosophy to believe something without solid proof or if it was not at least beyond a “reasonable” doubt; now, believing something is considered rational as long as one does not hold inconsistent beliefs or defy well-established evidence. (Today few philosophers are strict evidentialists for questions other than religion.) Rationality in this sense is holding a set of logically consistent beliefs (which is harder to do than it sounds), showing that one’s beliefs are well-grounded experientially, and giving plausible reasons for holding the beliefs and for countering criticism. One must also be willing to change one’s beliefs. One’s beliefs should also be consistent with what is accepted as the best knowledge available, including established scientific theories.27
The first question is whether it is rational for mystics themselves to count their experiences as evidence for the doctrines they hold. (If the depth-mystical experience were truly empty, it would be irrational to treat it as evidence of anything. But as discussed, it is not truly empty: a sense of reality, oneness, and fundamentality is usually retained.) The chief argument in its favor is the traditional “argument from agreement”—i.e., mystics from around the world converge on the same claims, once we discount the differences in expressions due to cultural differences.28 In William James’s words, there is an “eternal unanimity” among mystics (1958: 321). But even in we can get around the naturalist explanations of the sameness of mystical experiences of each type, this argument runs aground on the hard fact of religious diversity: as with the argument from religious experience, religious theorists must twist other religion’s conceptions and doctrines in order to fabricate an “agreement.” In a circular argument, we end up with an artificial consensus based on some theological position. At best, this might support a general entailed claim of the existence of transcendent realities, but such an agreement cannot support the concrete realities of the doctrines of any specific tradition.
The other arguments in favor are the principle of credulity and the analogy to sense-experience discussed above. Under these, mystical experiences are innocent until proven guilty—i.e., it is rational to accept them until the mechanisms of mystical experiences are shown to be unreliable or disqualified for rational acceptance by other considerations. But problems with the principle of credulity and the analogy to sense-experience were presented above.
Of course, the rationality of a practice does not establish the truth of its claims—it can be rational to hold a belief at the time that later turns out to be false when further evidence is gathered. So too, being rational in holding one set of beliefs does not entail that those holding other beliefs must be irrational—different rational people can draw different conclusions from the same evidence. William Alston (1991) holds that it is rational for Christians to regard the Christian mystical practice as sufficiently reliable to be the source of prima facie justification for the Christian beliefs it engenders, and so, in the absence of stronger evidence to the contrary, Christian mystical perception should be accepted as a reliable cognitive access to God and the foundation for other beliefs. But he admits that Hindus and Buddhists are just as rational in engaging in their own socially established doxastic practices, even though these three traditions are incompatible in their claims (ibid.: 274–75). The doxastic justification makes the claim to the equal rationality of all mystics fairly easy to establish—in fact, it is hard not to be rational by Alston’s criterion of an established social practice that we do not have sufficient reason for regarding as unreliable (ibid.: 6), since each tradition has responded extensively to the scrutiny and criticism of opponents over a long period of time and natural explanations do not at this time refute all mysticism.
Each tradition would thus be rational to engage in by Alston’s standard. In addition, there is no independent non-question-begging way to establish that one tradition’s doxastic practices are more reliable for getting at the truth than its competitors, and so all established practices would be equally rational and well-informed epistemic peers: each has the same or relevantly similar experiences, each is aware of criticism and alternative positions, each produces impressive arguments, and each ends up with well-reasoned positions. Among such peers, no position is more likely to be correct. In short, all mystics who have produced coherent sets of mystical beliefs are epistemically equal. Yet epistemic peers can disagree. They can reasonably draw different—even conflicting—conclusions from the same evidence. The result is an irresolvable relativism. Alston concludes that “though it is not epistemically the best of all possible worlds, it is rational in this situation for one to continue to participate in the (undefeated) practice in which s/he is involved, hoping that the inter-practice contradictions will be sorted out in due time” (ibid.: 7).
But this presents a problem. Each mystic has evidence privately available only to him- or herself, and the result is a conflict of claims. Alston’s approach does not provide any rational way to prefer one tradition over another or any way to adjudicate the conflicting knowledge-claims. His approach is purely defensive. And Alston also has to admit that the diversity of outputs from religions that are not consistent does lessen the rationality of all mystical practices (1991: 275). Indeed, the substantive inconsistencies between traditions undermine the very idea that mystical experiences are at all reliable as a basis of belief-forming in general—the beliefs of different traditions still conflict, and if one set is correct, then most multiple doctrines on each given point must be false. Mystics typically advance highly ramified concepts and doctrines: if these conflict, how can we treat any of the doctrines as claims warranted by expert testimony? This undercuts the rationality of accepting (as Ninian Smart [1965] does) that the diverge doctrines at least justify the broader, less ramified claim that there is a transcendent reality even if we do not know what it is. In addition, there is divergence even within Christian mystical practices themselves—as Alston realizes (1991: 192–94)—and this is itself a major problem: if these practices cannot converge even within one tradition, the rationality of mysticism is even more severely challenged. Alston speaks of the “practical rationality” of engaging in any socially established doxastic practice that one does not have sufficient reasons for regarding as unreliable (ibid.: 168) since there is no noncircular way to distinguish between different reliable doxastic practices. And as a practical matter, we all of course do have to choose how to live. But once the religious know of the variety of socially established but conflicting mystical practices, there is the issue of the arbitrariness in their choice, and labeling adherence to the tradition one grew up in as “practical rationality” or “the most reasonable course of action” does not get around this.
However, the threshold for rationality is low enough that we can conclude that mystics can rationally accept the knowledge-claims of their tradition based on their experiences even without the hope that the interpractice contradictions will be resolved someday. (So too, for similar reasons naturalists are rational in rejecting all transcendent mystical knowledge-claims.) Introvertive mystics themselves can rationally accept their own experiences as cognitive of a transcendent reality until a successful natural reduction of mystical experiences is established or until transcendent knowledge-claims are shown to be incoherent. (Whether a scientific explanation of the mechanisms of a mystical experience can ever in principle be grounds to reject mystical claims will be an issue in the next chapter.) Thus, it is rational today for introvertive mystics to believe that they have had an experience of a transcendent reality if they have a set of coherent and well-grounded beliefs. (Advaita is a favorite target for the claim of incoherence.29) The diversity of competing and equally well-established mystical ways of life and interpretations of what is experienced does eviscerate the idea that these experiences can uniquely support the knowledge-claims of any particular mystical tradition and so lessens the degree of confidence any mystic can have in his or her doctrines. Nevertheless, it does not make it irrational to hold them if their claims are rationally defendable. It is rational, for example, to hold “I believe I have experienced God, even though I know that I might be deluding myself” or to hold “I believe the doctrines of my tradition, even though I accept that you are just as rationally justified in holding the doctrines of your tradition that conflict with mine.”
In sum, it is rational today for mystics in established traditions to accept their claims as cognitive. But are those who have not had mystical experiences rationally justified in accepting mystics’ experiences as evidence for holding the doctrines of their own tradition? Or do mystics have a greater epistemic warrant than do nonmystics? William James believed that mystical states are “absolutely authoritative” for those who have had them but not for those who have not (1958: 324, 382, 414, 422, 424): the experiences are so vivid for the experiencer that the problem of religious diversity is an issue only for nonmystics. But if the knowledge is authoritative only for the experiencer, is it not “subjective” in the pejorative sense? How does the vividness counter the epistemic issues when the same experience is just as vivid for mystics holding conflicting doctrines? The experience may be so overwhelming that one is no longer concerned with conflicting doctrines, but that is only a matter of emotion—it is not epistemic grounds for rejecting the doctrines of others. That is, the vividness of the experience or an intense sense of reality or knowledge does bear psychologically on wanting to hold one’s beliefs, but it does not add anything epistemically once one knows that others with the same experience and the same sense of overwhelming intensity hold conflicting beliefs. Prior to being aware of other traditions being “live options,” to use William James’s phrase, it may have been rational to hold one’s own mystical beliefs as in a class superior to all others, but once one realizes that others are in the same epistemic situation, one cannot rationally treat one’s own interpretation as privileged without further argument.
Richard Swinburne believes that under the principles of credulity and testimony it is rational for nonmystics to accept mystical experiences as veridical until the mechanisms for the experiences are shown to be unreliable (1991). But nonmystics would have to rely on other persons’ testimony concerning their private experiences for support for their own beliefs. In addition, the mystics’ private experiences are not the same in character as the sense-experiences of nonmystics and are open to more possible objections that would show that mystics are mistaken and hence may defeat the mystics’ claims. Thus, nonmystics must make a leap of faith in accepting mystics’ testimony that they do not have to make in accepting a reliable observer when only sense-experience is involved. And having to rely on another’s testimony does lessen the degree of the rationality in accepting mystical claims: as James would agree, nonmystics would not have the assurance that comes from actually drinking water rather than merely accepting the claim that water quenches thirst based on others’ experiences. Moreover, why is a nonmystical Christian entitled to accept mystical experiences as evidence of their doctrines over other tradition’s doctrines? They do not have grounds to believe that Christian mystics are more reliable than mystics in other traditions, who presumably have the same experiences and yet hold conflicting doctrines.
In sum, the presence of competing doctrines brings into question the epistemic right of all believers, whether they have had a mystical experience or not, to say that their tradition’s interpretations must be better than others’. That at least lowers the degree of rationality for mystics and nonmystical believers alike.30 In general, the rationality of both groups is on the same footing: since mystical claims are made in a web of arguments, it should be as rational for those who have not had the experiences but accept that others have had them to affirm the tradition’s claims that are ultimately agreed on—mystics are not in a better position on the final developed claims. Even if nonmystics have a different understanding of a tradition’s doctrines (e.g., seeing God as a transcendent object comparable in some way to phenomenal objects), they can still accept that mystics have experienced that reality.
Another issue is this: can one set of doctrines be established as inherently more rational than others?31 Probably not. First, no doctrine is inherently rational but depends on the other beliefs and evidence—it was once rational to believe the earth was flat and unmoving, but in light of new evidence it no longer is. Second, it is hard to establish one rational mystical set of doctrines as being more rational to hold than another, i.e., that it is better established either experientially or by reasons, in light of the doctrinal conflicts over acceptable arguments. If beliefs are well-grounded experientially and coherent, that as a practical matter is the end of the matter. In principle, there may be better reasons and evidence for holding one set of beliefs than another, but trying to establish such superiority would quickly dissolve into a matter of competing metaphysics with no resolution possible between those who accept different basic principles. We are not in a position to present transcendent realities for examination. Thus, anyone can remain confident that no other doxastic practice will be established as rationally superior to one’s own rational practices. But that many mystical doxastic practices can be shown to be rational does lessen the rationality of adhering to the doctrines of any one.
This conclusion follows only if all mystics are in the same boat epistemically. They do appear so: they have the same or relevantly similar experiences, and all traditions have been tested by criticism and responses over time. Thus, all mystics appear to be epistemic peers. But the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga disagrees. He offers a different way to claim that theistic beliefs are rational even while denying that one needs to present any evidence or argument for those beliefs (2000). In a type of foundationalism, he takes an idea from John Calvin (also see Otto 1958: 143–54) and holds that core Christian beliefs are not supported by other beliefs, but they are not groundless: they are supported by a nonpropositional experience—a “sense of the divine (sensus divinitatis).” Core Christian beliefs are fallible but supported by this sense. They are “basic” because they are not derived from other beliefs but are the basis for inferring other beliefs and for a theist’s reasoning. Thus, commitment to core theistic beliefs is the epistemic bedrock for a theist’s structure of knowledge. In addition, the core beliefs are “properly basic” because God gave human beings a mental faculty similar to sense-perception that disposes us to accept belief in God and enables us to form properly basic beliefs about God’s presence and nature when the mental faculty is operating normally. Theists thus are epistemically entitled to begin with a belief in God without any supporting arguments or evidence to determine the rationality of other beliefs. This sense is not a mystical experience; it includes seeing the majesty of nature or the intricacy of a flower as the creations of God. It provides a natural knowledge of God and provides grounds for the belief, but it is not evidence for the truth of one’s specific religious beliefs, just as seeing a sense-object justifies believing that that object exists. Thus, core theistic beliefs cannot be criticized for not being grounded in evidence. Rather, belief in God supports other beliefs and its truth is guaranteed by the sensus divinitatis. Under a reliabilist theory of knowledge, this sense warrants belief because it is designed for the purpose of producing true beliefs and it functions properly in certain circumstances. As long as this alleged sense has not been discredited, Plantinga claims that it is just as rational for Christians to hold their belief in God without further argument as it is rational for them to hold their basic perceptual beliefs—when their cognitive faculties are operating normally, theists can trust their beliefs in both circumstances equally. Thus, at present it is rational for Christians to hold their beliefs since they are supported by a mental faculty that has not been shown to be unreliable, and it is irrational for atheists to reject these beliefs since their sense of the divine is malfunctioning due to sin or some other defect, just as our sense-perception and memory may malfunction due to our fallibility and self-deception. Thus, atheism is not properly basic. So too for nontheisms. Atheists, nontheists, and those who have lost their faith are in this way comparable to blind people with respect to sense-perception. If Plantinga is correct, Christian mystics, or at least theistic mystics, are in a superior epistemic position to nontheistic mystics. Thus, nontheistic mystics are not epistemic peers of theistic ones.
However, it is hard to see bedrock Christian beliefs as not in need of any support by evidence or arguments from other beliefs when so many other people do not see them as true. The same holds for a more general belief in theism. It is questionable that one can be deemed rational when one can only assert “God has created us all in such a way that my beliefs are better than yours, and so I don’t have to give any reasons for that!” Such beliefs do not seem “basic” but in need of support by reasons at least recognizable to critics. Simply to assert a “divine sense” that requires no argument seems dogmatic, especially when the examples that Plantinga gives of its effect may be explainable in natural terms. So too, the alleged “sense of God” does not seem analogous to sense-perception: even most theists would admit that we can disagree about the existence of God in a way that we cannot dispute the general reliability of sense-perceptions. In particular, all religious claims for transcendent realities are open to competing natural explanations while the explanation of sense-experiences has no nonnatural competitor. Nor does his posited sense explain why there are nontheists—why should a major segment of humanity be “blind”? In his characterization, the religious sense is not merely a sense of a transcendent reality, but a sense of the more specific theistic conception of a god. Why do, for example, people raised as Advaitins and Buddhists respond differently in circumstances where theists respond with theistic beliefs? So too, a sense of dread or fear in numinous experiences may come from the unconscious mind alone or from being brought up with a certain version of a transcendent reality and is not per se evidence of the presence of a god. How do we know that the intuition of a designer and creator is a divinely implanted sense rather than merely an anthropomorphic projection of a sense of agency and purpose in the natural realm that has evolved in us naturally for purposes of survival? By introducing a “sense of the divine,” Plantinga seems to be trying to make what is no more than one metaphysical belief that needs support into something like an experience to shield it from criticism.
The diversity of religious traditions also presents a major hurdle. Plantinga concedes that awareness of this diversity does decrease the strength with which the warrant of theistic belief is held, although he denies that it defeats it (2000: 457). To nontheists, their beliefs seem as “basic” to them in the sense he intends as theistic ones seems to theists. In addition, the alleged sensus divinitatis leads to conflicting beliefs even among theists of different religions and different subtraditions within those religions. Moreover, according to Plantinga only Christians are properly inspired by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit and saved. But obviously members of the other traditions can assert something similar for themselves, and here Plantinga must offer an argument, not a bald assertion of faith. As things stand, we have nothing to suggest that the cognitive faculties of nontheists are malfunctioning, damaged, or defective except Plantinga’s fiat. In fact, he even concedes that his approach only works for those who find that the belief that God exists is within their own set of basic beliefs. He admits that people in other faiths will have quite different beliefs that they consider “properly basic.” But this makes it impossible to offer an argument for the superiority of theism or any religious tradition—there is instead a pluralism of competing sets of properly basic beliefs, each immune from outside judgment. This only hurts the rationality of his position. In addition, having to rely on the testimony of others for experiences that one has not had would lessen the degree of rationality in accepting mystics’ claims, as noted in the last section. And it is hard to see reliance on someone else’s experiences as constituting a “basic” belief, since such reliance would require defending.
Nor does Plantinga’s theory seem to account adequately for the presence of the nonreligious who simply are not interested in religious matters. Many people looking at the majesty of the night sky may well think that there must be a designer/creator behind all this to whom we owe gratitude and obedience, but there are still many others who are awed by the grandeur of the universe and do not think of anything transcending it; and there are many who are impressed by science who agree with Steven Weinberg when he famously said “[t]he more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Claiming, as Plantinga does, that a God-given “sense of the divine” is malfunctioning in these nontheistic reactions due to sinfulness or spiritual immaturity is simply question-begging and demands further argument. The theistic reaction looks more like an inference than the operation of a special God-implanted mental faculty. And invoking the Calvinist position that God has not chosen those who do not react theistically is only an ad hoc excuse. Such a position may follow from his own beliefs, but to others it seems to be arbitrarily privileging the tradition he just happened to have been raised in.32 Buddhists and Advaitins may respond that it is belief in a personal god that in fact is the result of a malfunctioning mystical cognitive faculty: the proper sense of the transcendent is contaminated by theists’ primitive response of seeing personal agents behind everything in nature. There is no neutral way to decide the question, but only a battle of competing beliefs, each of which requires further support.
Plantinga shapes the notion of an innate spiritual sense to fit the position he was already committed to, and those in other traditions have the same epistemic right to shape the sense differently to fit their prior convictions. Everyone again ends up being minimally rational, whatever their religious tradition’s basic doctrines. Being rational in holding one’s beliefs is less difficult to justify than trying to justify one’s beliefs as superior to others’ beliefs. But the great diversity of religious and nonreligious views is not what one would expect if any religious beliefs were “properly basic.” And if there are rival sets of allegedly “properly basic beliefs,” the sheer symmetry of the situation strongly suggests that none are in fact “basic,” let alone “properly basic,” but only increases the need for a defense of one’s beliefs. One cannot exempt one’s own beliefs from a need for reasons by calling them alone “properly basic” once one is aware of competitors in the same position as oneself. Each competitor has as much right to claim that its beliefs are “properly basic.” The pluralism of conflicting beliefs extends even to different theistic religions and subtraditions: they may all have the supposed sensus divinitatis functioning properly, yet they still end up with beliefs deemed reliably formed that conflict. And for Plantinga to claim that the sense is functioning properly only when mystics reach the doctrines he happens to accept is obviously question-begging, and members of the other traditions could make the same claim for their doctrines. He would have to present more arguments for why nontheistic mystics are not in fact in the same epistemic situation as Christian mystics with their conflicting beliefs. Indeed, if only one set of beliefs of one theistic religion is in fact epistemically superior, then all the other theistic sets based on the same “sense of the divine” are in some way wrong. This means that the majority of mankind is wrong on religious matters—but then the alleged “sense of the divine” is not a reliable means for formulating “basic beliefs,” unlike sense-experience, since the majority of people are in fact misled by it in their religious beliefs.
As things stand now, mystics of the various religious traditions of the world appear to be relying on their own equally compelling experiences and similar conceptual resources, and thus they appear to be epistemic peers or at least in the same position to deny that other mystics are epistemically superior. That is, one does not have to advance a compelling argument that Christian or other beliefs are very likely to be untrue; rather, one only has to note that mystics in all well-established traditions are just as entitled to claim that they are in a epistemologically superior position to realize that none are. The burden would be on anyone claiming to elevate their epistemic position above others to justify why that is so. Simply asserting that one set of religious beliefs is superior to all others without some independent and non-question-begging argument would be arbitrary and not grounds to claim any epistemic superiority. Without independent arguments showing that apparent competitors are not epistemic peers, we will end up with a relativism of “properly basic beliefs,” and in such circumstances no one would be warranted in claiming that one group of mystics is in a superior position to others. In the presence of equally rational alternatives, no set of beliefs in religious matters is exempt from a need for argument—i.e., none are “basic.” Personal certainty is not enough: one’s experiences, no matter how vivid or intense, and one’s conviction that no other religious beliefs could possibly be superior, do not warrant believing that one’s beliefs are epistemically superior to others without an actual comparison of the various practices of belief-formation. Other mystics’ experiences are equally vivid and compelling for them. Only after one has gone through the trouble of actually examining the epistemic situations of all competitors could one possibly be warranted in believing others are not one’s peers in this regard. One cannot simply retreat into one’s faith and fiat.
In sum, those who privilege Christian beliefs under Plantinga’s approach cannot present a response to people who do not share the alleged theistic sensus divinitatis but appear equally well-grounded both in experiences and arguments. We end up with a relativism of competing “divine senses” and allegedly “properly basic beliefs” and equally rational believers. But, if anything, this shows that Christian beliefs, and by extension any other religious beliefs, are not “properly basic” but in need of further rational support—when everyone can claim that their beliefs are privileged, none are. One may argue that Buddhism is in a stronger position than theistic traditions since it has fewer transcendent ontic commitments (see Webb 2015), but mystical experiences may in fact involve more than Buddhists claim and so Buddhists too are in the same position of having to justify their doctrines. In short, the commitments of any specific religious tradition still depend on beliefs that must be defended on grounds other than faith.
The positions arrived at in this chapter are these:
•Mystical experiences cannot guarantee their own cognitivity, and we are not in a position to determine if introvertive mystics experience transcendent realities. (This will be discussed further in the next chapter.)
•Even if mystics do experience transcendent realities, there are limitations on what mystics can claim to know about the nature of any transcendent realities.
•Mystical experiences do not favor one tradition’s set of doctrines over another, and there are no theory-neutral ways of determining if one set is best.
•It is currently rational for introvertive mystics in established traditions to accept their experiences as experiences of some transcendent reality.
•Mystics are rational to accept their experiences as evidence for the doctrines that they hold, but this commitment is weakened by the presence of equally rational mystics holding competing doctrines. Nonmystics also can rationally treat mystical experiences as evidence of their doctrines, but with less confidence.
The strength of mystical experiences may overwhelm experiencers, and it may be impossible to convince a mystic that his or her understanding is incorrect. But the philosophical questions are, What are these experiences evidence of? What is the proper understanding of them? And is it reasonable to believe in one’s own interpretation when one is aware that other experiencers have conflicting interpretations? Any certainty about mystical doctrines is misplaced: no account is impervious to the possibility of error, no matter now certain a mystic may feel. Mystics cannot claim to “just know” that they realized God or a nonpersonal reality. Any certainty here is further damaged by the viability of plausible naturalist interpretations of mystical experiences. (And it must be noted that it is not merely those who have not had such experiences who deny any cognitive value to these experiences: some who have had these experiences also deny they produce any insights into reality. This points to the role of postexperience judgments in our evaluation of them.) Even if there is one transcendent reality and all introvertive mystics experience it, nevertheless there are equally well grounded but conflicting views of its nature. The different views are not revealing different aspects of that reality but revealing both our limitations in knowing its nature and the presence of cultural ideas in any mystical knowledge-claims. The conflict of claims does not rule out that one may in fact be superior to all the others, but we are not in a position to know which one that is. At best, introvertive mystical experiences offer some evidence for the existence of something transcendent. Still, mystical experiences should be treated as a matter of cognitivity and not a matter of emotion alone unless they can be shown to be cognitively empty. But we are not in a position to determine if mystical experiences are veridical or are more insightful than ordinary experiences.
Nevertheless, introvertive mystics at present can rationally treat their experiences as some evidence of transcendent realities. But again, naturalists will dispute these experiences as evidence, and the experiences cannot be straightforward evidence of one tradition’s mystical doctrines of the nature of what is experienced since some equally well grounded doctrines in different traditions genuinely conflict. Thus, in light of the diversity of plausible sets of mystical beliefs without any means of resolution, no certainty in doctrines here is possible, no matter how powerful and convincing an experience may appear to a mystic. From their experiences, mystics may have no doubt that they experienced something, but this certitude cannot carry over to the postexperience attempts at understanding what was experienced. The diversity of doctrines in turn leads to the very real question of whether mystical experiences are reliable sources for generating beliefs. The rationality of accepting the specific doctrines of a tradition is thus at least lessened. Ninian Smart summed up the situation as a paradox: “On the one hand nothing seems more certain than faith or more compelling than religious experience. On the other hand, nothing seems less certain than any one particular system, for to any one system there are so many vital and serious alternatives” (1985: 76).
Are we then left with simply a pluralism of conflicting sets of doctrines and with the basic dispute between naturalists and those advocating a transcendent realism unresolved? Mystical experiences themselves cannot help to resolve these disputes: no new information will be forthcoming from future mystical experiences—they will merely be of the same nature as those in the past. Even if all introvertive mystical experiences involve experiencing the same transcendent reality, this does not change the fact that after the experiences what was experienced is always seen through some perspective, and we are not in a position to tell which, if any, is best. Mystics typically see the reality in terms of their tradition’s doctrines and reject the conflicting doctrines from other traditions. Theistic exclusivists are not the only ones who reject the idea that different doctrines are merely different responses to the same reality. But mystics also routinely accept that there is more to a transcendent reality than is humanly experiencable or knowable, and so today some may also be willing to hold their beliefs tentatively and accept that mystical experiences are not “self-evident” or “self-validating.” They may accept that they see mystical experiences in terms of their own tradition’s doctrines but realize that this is but one option and that at least some other ways of seeing them are equally justified. So too, new religious options may arise in the future.
The only way to assure that one is avoiding error is to remain agnostic. But it is difficult to remain agnostic on the issue of the nature of what one experienced when it seems so overwhelming and so important. Nonmystics also often attach great significance to mystics’ alleged insights in justifying their faith. In a “religiously ambiguous” universe, we are forced to choose. William James, for one, thought that we are epistemically entitled to make a decision on issues of human existence that are “forced, live, and momentous” when the evidence is inconclusive and the neutralism of agnosticism is difficult to maintain.33 And even if there is epistemic parity between disputants, it is indeed hard to suspend judgment.
In addition, no fundamental choice among competing basic belief-systems can ever be fully justified on rational grounds, since there is no further mutually agreed-on level of beliefs or values for competitors to appeal to. Here we reach the level of our deepest bedrock beliefs—the conflict will come down to our intuitions and judgments about what the fundamental nature of reality is, what we consider ultimately valuable, and what types of experiences we accept as cognitive.34 The religious and nonreligious are in the same boat when it comes to the ultimate groundlessness of all belief. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say ‘This is simply what I do’ ” (Philosophical Investigations, para. 217). All we can ultimately do is show what we are committed to by how we live. With all evidence and agreed-on standards of reasoning exhausted, we have a conflict of starting points for any argument or justification; it becomes a matter of worldviews and metaphysics, and philosophy will not be able to resolve the dispute.35 This is not to say that one’s final decision cannot be well-informed and carefully considered, including examining possible alternatives and criticisms and advancing defenses that opponents accept as reasons (even if they are not convinced by them), but ultimately we do have to make a choice that we cannot further justify. Such a choice may be deemed nonrational, but it is not irrational (i.e., contrary to reason).
In such circumstances, it is hard to conclude that introvertive mystics themselves are irrational today in holding their extraordinary experiences as evidence of some transcendent reality and also of their own tradition’s mystical beliefs, even if they accept that they may be wrong about transcendent realism and that other mystics are equally reasonable and well-grounded and that the full nature of the reality experienced in introvertive experiences is a mystery. Thus, mystics may rationally continue to hold the beliefs of their tradition and continue to practice their tradition’s way of life, but they must realize that they may be wrong and that they are not in an epistemologically superior position to other mystics and nonmystics, and thus they must accept their beliefs only tentatively. Combining such tentativeness with a full religious commitment may not be easy.