1. For histories of the term, see Bouyer 1980, de Certeau 1992, and Schmidt 2003.
2. The Indo-European root of these words—“mu”—is also the root for the English words “mystery” and “mute” and the Sanskrit word “muni” meaning a “silent one,” one title of the Buddha. Does this silence and hiddenness mean that mysticism should be classified as esoteric? That depends on what is meant by “esoteric.” Not every person has had mystical experiences, and advanced meditation requires the guidance and instruction of a meditative master. There also are groups both East and West, such as the Tantrics and Gnostics, who give advanced teachings only to initiates. (The name “upanishad” may come from Sanskrit words meaning “to sit near,” suggesting that the teachings were only for select students, although this etymology is suspect.) But mystical experiences may be common, and meditation does not require any special skills (although not all people may have a disposition toward meditating). And the basic teachings of all mystical traditions are open to all today.
3. According to Andrew Greeley, theology and spirituality split by the year 1300. By that time, theology had become exclusively a university discipline and spirituality had branched off as a separate concern of monks and mystics (1974: vii).
4. It should be noted that “contemplation” in medieval Europe also covered philosophical reflection—there was no hard-and-fast line between mystics and philosophers when philosophy, following the Greeks, was considered a way of life leading to an inner transformation. Both philosophizing and meditating were “contemplative” activities.
5. Brian Lancaster also characterizes Kabbala in Judaism as “a way, a holistic path,” rather than a doctrine or a spiritual teaching (2009: 13).
6. It is often claimed that mystical experiences or drug-altered states of consciousness are the origin of religion (e.g., Stace 1960a). Mystical experiences may be a source of a sense of transcendent realities such as gods, souls independent of the body, and heaven and hell. But even if that is so, it is doubtful that such experiences and the role of shamans in tribal societies would alone have produced all the complex phenomena of religion. Today anthropologists studying early and preliterate societies tend to see the origin of religion as a natural evolutionary byproduct of social interactions, with a belief in anthropomorphized supernatural agents who are like us only more powerful, and without appeal to mystical experiences.
7. Spontaneous mystical experiences raise a definitional problem. Does having one such experience make the experiencer a “mystic”? Does having more? Must a spontaneous mystical experience transform the experiencer for the label to apply? Or must one undertake mystical practices or even a full mystical way of life with a path leading to enlightenment? On the other hand, what if one is on a path but has not had any mystical experiences yet?
8. Today the distinction between numinous and mystical experiences is falling out of fashion in religious studies (see Kohav 2014). It is being replaced by one category—“religious experiences”—as if all religious experiences are the same in nature and whatever is said about any of them applied equally to all. Lumping together significantly different experiences is a step backward in analysis that reflects a growing lack of interest in religious experiences in religious studies. (See Roth 2008 for a proposal to reinject studying “subjective” religious experiences in religious studies, rather than its current reliance on only observable historical and sociological data. However, he remains “very pessimistic” about the prospects for change [ibid.: 19].) In addition, it should be pointed out again that mystical experiences are not always taken to be religious in nature.
9. Buddhists may not characterize this as “emptying the mind,” but as switching from a conceptualizing mind to a nonconceptualizing mind that mirrors what is presented to it. Mindfulness is a direct perception (pratyaksha) of whatever is presented free of conceptualizations (kalpanas) of independent objects. The enlightened mind still has concepts in some sense (since the enlightened can speak), but no sense of distinct self-existent realities.
10. “Depth” is intended to denote a transcendent reality. It is not meant to disparage naturalism as a “flat” view of reality. Naturalists who are not reductive materialists can advocate a view of reality with physical, biological, psychological, and social dimensions to a person and to the world, even if there is only one ontic dimension.
11. Psychologists studying those who have had various experiences point out that the experiences often do not fulfill all of the definitional criteria laid out by the psychologists for “a complete mystical experience” (e.g., Hood 2002).
12. Meister Eckhart did say that if a person truly humbles himself, God cannot withhold his goodness but must flow into him (2009: 281–82), but no techniques can force this detachment. In the Jewish Kabbala, there is a tradition of trying to modify the inner life of the Godhead to bring about a mystical experience (Idel 1988; Lancaster 2005: chap. 5). This manipulation is sometimes called “theurgic mysticism.”
13. For example, Dao de jing 19, 48, 64, and 81; also see Jones 1993: 47–55; 2014a: 204–10 on “unknowing” in the Isha Upanishad. The term “unknowing” is also used in another sense among mystics: not as a process of emptying the mind, but as a positive knowledge of God that so contrasts with ordinary knowledge that we cannot even call it “knowing” at all.
14. That there also are subconscious processes operating in the everyday state of mind—called “samskaras” in Buddhism and in the Yoga Sutras—should not be overlooked. By letting subconscious emotions enter consciousness, one can release them. According to Indian mystical schools, all subconscious processes are ended in enlightenment.
15. Mystics in general do not claim that the transcendent reality that is experienced is terrifying or to be feared, as occurs often with numinous experiences. For example, Eckhart said not to fear God, because that would cause one to flee from him; rather fear losing God (2009: 282). Transcendent realities are usually seen as benevolent or neutral. But fear does occur in mystical states in the process of emptying the mind during meditation. It is not experiencing a “trembling in the presence of God” involved in revelations, but persons may feel fear, terror, or paranoia if they cannot handle the experiences. Mystics may also feel the distress of abandonment if they are not making spiritual progress. However, negative states during meditation are usually attributed to a demonic force or to the meditator’s own mind and are not projected onto a transcendent reality. But these possible negative effects of meditation should not be overlooked. Drugs and meditation may exacerbate the conditions of some people with mental disorders—indeed, mystical experiences may be opening the same territory trod by schizophrenics and psychotics. Introvertive experiences can lead to confusion, fear, panic attacks, and paranoia. In one drug study, 44 percent of the volunteers reported delusions or paranoid thinking, although the authors of the report said that this could be controlled by better screening and by qualified guidance during the experiences (Griffiths et al. 2011). Some training in a psychological framework and a set of beliefs that would prepare meditators or drug subjects to handle what is experienced may be essential before any serious mystical training is undertaken. Otherwise, detachment from normal emotions can lead to depression or much worse.
16. Asceticism to purify oneself is one approach to potentially cultivate mystical experiences, but mysticism and asceticism cannot be equated. The ascetic Heinrich Suso may have followed Eckhart’s teachings, but Eckhart was not an ascetic, nor were any of his other major known followers. Asceticism can lead to mystical receptivity, but ascetics see their renunciation of all material things or their physical mortification as an end in itself. And the Buddha is not alone in ultimately rejecting asceticism as a way to enlightenment. Some traditions (e.g., Sufism) at first embraced asceticism but became less ascetic later.
17. Mystical mindfulness should be distinguished from conventional mindfulness. Both involve attention, but mystical mindfulness involves an “unknowing”—emptying one’s mind of all conceptual, dispositional, and emotional content. Everyday mindfulness involves keeping some idea in mind—e.g., being mindful of our rights or of our status in society. It is a matter of actively drawing distinctions, not passive perceptual receptivity. For a study of the latter type of mindfulness, see Langer 1989.
18. The nonmystical Albert Camus also spoke of the conceptualizing mind alienating us from the world in “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “If I were a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to the world. I would be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness.”
19. The Chandogya’s clay/pot example is actually part of an introvertive mystical tradition: what is real (Brahman) is hidden from sense-experience but is uncovered by yogic experiences. Like the “self within the heart,” it is not a phenomenal reality open to the senses; rather, it is a transcendent reality that can be experienced only by stilling the mind.
20. The Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec is often cited for the claim that there is a distinctive theistic introvertive experience. But it is not clear whether he claimed that the distinction between the experiencer and God is present in the experience itself or is only seen after the experience is over. For example, he wrote: “At the very moment when we try to examine and observe what is it that we are experiencing, we slip back into the activity of reasoning, at which we become aware of distinction and difference between ourselves and God. We then find God to be outside us in all his incomprehensibility” (1985: 176).
21. The term “enlightenment” entered mystical parlance in the late nineteenth century as a translation of the Sanskrit term “bodhi” by the Pali scholar T. W. Rhys Davids, who was intentionally linking it to the knowledge of the European Enlightenment. “Bodhi” comes from the same Sanskrit root as the word “buddha”—“budh.” It can be better translated as “awakening”—i.e., the Buddha is one who has awaken from the sleep of root-ignorance (avidya). But the term “enlightenment” will be used here as a general category for mystics who have attained a state of selflessness even if that is not their final goal.
22. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant said that “Happiness is the state of a rational being in the world for whom in the whole of his existence everything proceeds according to his wish and will.” That would be the opposite of the selfless joy of a mystic for whom there is no longer an individual’s “wish and will.”
23. Mystical bliss does give mysticism an other-worldly air. Meister Eckhart said that the joy made all of one’s worldly suffering bearable (2009: 80).
24. Some traditions deny that any true “liberation in this life” (jivan-mukti) is possible, i.e., that being tied to the body with its subconscious functions keeps us from ever becoming truly selfless. But most Advaitins affirm such liberation since enlightenment is only a matter of one’s knowledge by participation regardless of one’s bodily state, and so being “embodied” does present a problem.
25. As noted before, the border between mystical experiences and other religious and nonreligious experiences is not bright. Wesley Wildman (2011) attempts a typology for all religious experiences based on their phenomenological features.
26. The word “illusion” is better than “delusion” for depicting extrovertive mysticism, since the error is a matter of ordinarily seeing reality incorrectly and not alleged to be the product of a brain disorder. It is more like mistaking a mirage for water than seeing something that is not there in any sense. The common Indian analogy for the root-ignorance is mistaking a rope for a snake: once our knowledge is corrected, we see the rope correctly.
1. The Buddhist parable of the raft—that the Buddha’s teachings are a raft to get us across the sea of suffering, but then are not to be clung to once we are on the other shore (Majjhima Nikaya 22)—is often taken today to mean that the Buddha’s teachings could be rejected as not actually conveying knowledge but were only of pragmatic value to attain an experience. But if one actually reads the entire passage, one sees that it does not suggest that the teachings were not true, but only that the enlightened no longer need to study them.
2. If we did away with the doctrines of karma and rebirth, traditional Buddhism would collapse: its central problem as articulated in the four Noble Truths is suffering (duhkha), and without rebirth that problem would end with our death. Stephen Batchelor argues that today one can be a Buddhist and even take a bodhisattva vow to help all creatures while being agnostic on the issues of rebirth and karma—to him, such beliefs are part of the old traditional Indian folk cosmology that can be jettisoned because they do not affect behavior (1997). Buddhists could of course still follow their ethics and practice meditation without those beliefs, but jettisoning these beliefs does remove the purpose and framework of the traditional Buddhist way of life as groundless (see Thurman & Batchelor 1997).
3. Buddhists do not include insight (prajna) and enlightenment (bodhi) in the same category as experiences. Advaitins also distinguish experiences subject to the means of correct knowledge (pramanas) from direct knowledge of Brahman (brahma-anubhava, brahma-vidya, brahma-jnana).
4. Even in Nyaya, an Indian tradition that accepts yogic perception as a means to correct knowledge, practitioners do not invoke their own experiences to justify claims.
5. William Forgie argues that the phenomenological content of theistic mystical experiences does not even identify God as the object of experience any more than sense-data identify sense-objects (1984, 1994).
6. The distinction here is between different levels in accounts of what reality is allegedly experienced, but this also relates to the difference between “thin” phenomenological descriptions of the felt content of the experiences themselves versus “thick” doctrinal descriptions of what is experienced.
7. A postmodern point that goes back to Nelson Goodman (1960) is conceptual relativism: there is no objective answer to what is “really there” because different sets of concepts cut up amorphous reality differently but with equal validity; thus, no set of concepts can claim to reflect what is really there. If this is the case, no set of concepts can claim to mirror transcendent realities better than another—all concepts will reflect what is there plus some human perspective. All our claims mix both elements. But even if there is no one correct way to depict a transcendent reality, this does not conflict with mystical realism: we do not “make the stars”—what is there exists regardless of whether human beings exist, but obviously it would not be classified as “a star” without our conceptualizations; with a different set of concepts, “the star disappears” only in the limited sense that that concept is no longer used. So too, declassifying Pluto as a planet in no meaningful sense “destroyed a planet.”
8. Again, mysticism is not necessarily religious. Even if depth-mystical experiences involve transcendent realities, an experiencer may give it a naturalistic interpretation, and so it may not have a transformative effect on the experiencer or be seen as giving meaning. Thus, it is hard to see the experience as inherently religious. Extrovertive mystical experiences of “nature mysticism” or the sheer that-ness of things are usually interpreted as having religious significance, but they need not be; however, if they occur outside some religious framework that gives them meaning, they can be disorienting and have a negative effect on one’s satisfaction with life (Byrd, Lear, & Schwenka 2000: 267–68). Also, meditation with a spiritual component may produce different effects than a secular approach and may produce experiences with more mystical characteristics (Wachholtz & Pargament 2005).
9. Ninian Smart rightly points out the danger that interpretations by others of mystics’ experiences can be in theologically loaded, highly ramified terms (1965: 81), but mystics’ own accounts may themselves result in highly ramified terms.
10. Today many people speak of being “spiritual” rather than “religious.” Spirituality typically focuses on an individual’s personal development, rather than religious institutions or the traditional doctrines of a particular religious tradition (see Ferrer & Sherman 2008). But whether the spiritual are members of a formal religion or not, they still must have some beliefs for understanding their own mystical experiences, even if their beliefs and values are an eclectic blend of what the person likes from different religious and nonreligious traditions and are not the highly ramified beliefs of a specific tradition’s theology. They may have less theological clutter, but they need some beliefs and values.
11. This finding, if confirmed, suggests that the presence or absence of differentiations in introvertive mystical experiences does not affect the neurology of the event and thus that neurology could not distinguish differentiated introvertive mystical experiences from empty ones. If so, nonconstructivists could not cite neurology in support of their position that depth-mystical experiences are devoid of conceptual structuring. But other studies cited above suggest that some states are free of structuring.
12. The moderate constructivist John Hick thought that this difference in the conscious states reported by the Tibetan monks and Christian nuns is hard to reconcile with a direct brain-to-consciousness causation (2006: 75). But if the differences in the reports reflect postexperience interpretations and not differences within the experiences themselves, then the monks and nuns had the same experience and only interpreted it differently (the nonconstructivist view), and the fact that the physiological effects are the same is only to be expected. On the other hand, if the subjective structuring affects the experience itself (the constructivist view), then the physiological effects again might be exactly the same regardless of whatever structuring is present: the physiological effects only reflect the fact that some structuring was present in the experience—what the specific structuring is is irrelevant to the physiological and neurological mechanisms.
13. The distinction between experience and conceptualization in mystical experiences can be traced to William James’s distinction between the experience and theological “over-beliefs” (1958: 387).
14. Constructivists may argue that mystical experiences do not precede doctrines, because doctrines arose in every society simply to construct a picture of the world that would make the existing religious practices seem plausible. Thus, any special experiences, including mystical ones, would have no role in forming doctrines.
15. Katz rightly claims that “[t]here is no intelligible way that anyone can legitimately argue that a ‘no-self’ experience of ‘empty’ calm is the same experience as the experience of intense, loving, intimate relationship between two substantial selves, one of whom is conceived as the personal God of western religion and all that this entails” (1978: 39–40). But this only points to there being more than one type of introvertive mystical experience: theistic and depth. It does not invalidate mystical claims or validate constructivism.
16. If meditation is guided toward a specific end, this may affect the activity of the areas of the brain associated with it. For example, there is evidence that if participants are engaged in meditation specially geared toward compassion, they become more compassionate and the areas of the brain connected to empathy are affected (Leung et al. 2013; Mascaro et al. 2013). Constructivists would see this as support for their position.
17. Epistemologists in classical Indian traditions also accepted that concepts play a role in everyday experiences—i.e., that everyday experiences and knowledge are permeated by our conceptualizations—but they were divided on the matter of mystical experiences.
18. Whether there is an “essence” of mysticism that converges with, or supports, one religious tradition’s doctrines is an issue for theologians and religious theorists in different religions. The philosophical analysis of different experiences and doctrines cannot support such a claim.
19. Stace reached an ontic conclusion from this: there is nothing to differentiate different minds, and so there is only one mind—one “pure ego in the universe” (1960a: 150–52). However, one may remain content with the simpler claim that similarly constructed brains or minds would have the same experience when all content is removed.
20. But there are constructivists in sociology and science studies who apply strong constructivism to scientific theories, facts, and observations (see Jones 2009: chap. 3). Their claim is that we have no direct, unmediated access to reality—all experiences are permeated with some conceptualization.
21. Empirical studies that rely on the experiencers’ responses to survey items and classifications tend to support nonconstructivism (e.g., Hood 1997). However, there is a problem: because questionnaires are typically theologically loaded (e.g., asking about God but not about a nonpersonal transcendent reality such as Brahman), constructivists may question whether surveys indicate any phenomenologically felt unity of actual experiences among experiencers. So too, if questionnaires use different terms for a transcendent reality, constructivists again may question whether there is any convergence in the experiences—experiencers may be having significantly different experiences.
22. David Preston (1988) argues that Zen teachings (including teachings on meditation) actually provide little guidance to Zen students: the body itself becomes more attentive through practice, and one finally attains a new state without thinking or emotion. If so, this does not help the constructivists’ case, since concepts apparently do not play a role in this process.
23. Near the end of his life, Thomas Aquinas had an experience that led him to say that “all that I have written seems like straw to me.” If that experience was mystical, this is hard to reconcile with the claim that mystical experiences are only intense feelings of one’s doctrines.
24. Religions are traditionally conservative: what is important is already known and so should be preserved and not changed. They have not been progressive like science. Thus, religions traditionally resist changes in knowledge. But religious doctrines, values, and practices nevertheless do change over time.
25. Constructivists may argue that transformations within mystical traditions (e.g., the rise of the Mahayana tradition within Buddhism) must have occurred for nonmystical reasons if mystical experiences remain a constant. They can also handle the problem of similar experiences occurring in different cultures in terms of a uniformity of human physiology. But the problems pointed out in the preceding paragraph in the text remain.
26. In addition, mystical teachers conclude from the actions and statements of their students that some experiences of their students are of the same nature as their own. But the experiences do remain private, and so this issue persists.
1. One may argue (following Sidney Hook) that a “state of consciousness” cannot be cognitive and that only discrete experiences within one can be. But in the case of introvertive mystical experiences, the state of consciousness and the experience are not distinct: the state of consciousness does not underlie separate experiences, as in the case of the everyday state of consciousness or mindfulness. It is the state of consciousness itself that is or is not cognitive.
2. It should go without saying, but experiences themselves cannot conflict with other experiences or with science—only our understanding and interpretation of them can.
3. Philosophers who rely on a principle of credulity (discussed below) often downplay the importance of any third-person checking by noting that such checking is ultimately circular (e.g., Gellman 2001)—i.e., the reliability of any given third-person checking of, say, perceptions depends on further third-person checking.
4. Intersubjective testing in science also requires training to see the significance of an observation—to determine, for example, whether a dot of light is a star or a planet—but anyone who has had the training can make the observation (although scientists may still disagree about theories).
5. An a priori rejection of all transcendent claims risks simply being circular. At a minimum, it would make the naturalists’ claim a matter of metaphysics. The argument that all transcendent explanations must be rejected because they cannot meet “modern epistemic standards” (Bagger 1999) ends up being an unconvincing postmodernist argument that merely points out that transcendent explanations conflict today with the current naturalist climate in academia (see Jones 2010: 195–97).
6. Faith in the authority of the Buddha is a theme of the widely accepted Lotus Sutra. One’s meditative experiences are then ultimately judged against such testimony. So too, the Japanese Zen master Dogen said that you must believe what a Zen master tells you.
7. Perhaps psychological disorders are one way that genuine mystical experiences are stimulated through disruption of the normal hold of the mind, but it is understandable that experiencers with such disorders would not attach cognitive significance to them under such circumstances.
8. Shankara, too, made an analogy to sense-perception for mystical experiences. However, his nondualistic metaphysics limits the analogy: sensory knowledge depends on causal relations, unlike awareness of the underlying Brahman (see Phillips 2001).
9. Naturalists take third-person checkability to be an essential feature of any successful epistemic practice (e.g., Fales 2001), and thus the lack of such checkability becomes grounds to reject all mystical claims. But while sense-experiences and their objects provide the paradigm for empirical claims, this requirement is only question-begging if transcendent realities in fact are not phenomenal objects. There may be other ways to establish mystical experiences as veridical.
10. For example, Keith Yandell dismisses the possibility of experiencing Brahman “without qualities” (nirguna) basically because something without qualities is nothing (1991: 299–300). If he had read a little more Advaita and did not treat Brahman as an intentional object within the phenomenal world, he would realize that Shankara is contrasting a transcendent reality with all things phenomenal: there is still something to be experienced—all illusions are seen to be illusions only against something real (sat), and the world of discrete objects is seen to be an illusion only by realizing the transcendent consciousness. (For other criticisms of Yandell, see Quinn1999; Wainwright 2012.)
11. One difficult problem is: where does God come from? Theists accept that God is “self-existent” or “self-caused” and that how self-existence is possible is a mystery. Nontheists are not so generous: they see these notions as incoherent and thus reject belief in God as irrational. (Also see Jones 2012b: 199–204 on Buddhist objections.)
12. It is truly amazing that today Christian theologians and others writing on comparative religion still try to make Buddhists out to be experiencing “Emptiness” (shunyata) as if it is a transcendent reality comparable to God, in order to make the theological claim that Buddhists are really experiencing God. Buddhists in the Prajnaparamita and Madhyamaka traditions do not “experience Emptiness”—there is no such reality. Rather, they experience the phenomena of the world as empty of anything giving them self-existence (svabhava)—they are not experiencing anything transcending this realm. (See Jones 2014b: 136–43.)
13. Here are two examples of the extremes that Christian theologians will go to to support their beliefs. Richard Swinburne argues that in fact there is no real conflict between religious traditions on the experience of God. He suggests that nontheists should describe their experiences in a “less committed way” as, for example, “experiences of the divine,” since experiences in non-Christian traditions are experiences of beings and things compatible with theism (1991: 316). Of course, nontheists could just as easily turn the situation around and call for theists to revise their overly ramified concepts of a loving person, since they believe that what is ultimately real is nonpersonal in nature. And if all mystics describe their experiences in “less committed ways,” no specific transcendent reality would be supported, and all religious theorists would then have free rein in devising any understanding of transcendent realities. Swinburne must also argue that all mystical experiences are really personal, theistic ones. That there are genuinely different mystical experiences—i.e., depth-mystical ones void of all differentiated content—that are free of any personal elements simply must be denied. Nelson Pike makes the bizarre claim that the “monastic” introvertive mystical experience is “phenomenologically theistic” despite being “empty” because its phenomenological history is somehow unconsciously present during the experience itself (1992: 160–65; also see Wainwright 1981: 117–19). He does not explain how the history can affect an “empty” experience: if the depth-mystical experience is truly empty of differentiated content, then any theistic residue in the experiencer from the past cannot somehow be present (although it may reemerge during the transition back to everyday consciousness).
14. The omnipresence of a either a pantheistic or panentheistic god is also hard to justify from any experience, although, like the other “omnis,” this may seem to be a reasonable inference.
15. So too with auditions: how could someone hearing a voice know it is an omnipotent God and not merely a powerful alien?
16. The first part of this sentence is adapted from Plotinus’s Enneads 5.5.6. Plotinus argued that we cannot know the nature of the One because we know only of the One through its emanations (the Eastern Orthodox Church agrees), and thus we do not know its nature in itself. All we can know of the One is that it is the cause of all things (ibid. 6.8.11–3, 3.8.10.32–35), although he said that even the term “cause” ultimately does not apply.
17. Not all mystical options have survived. Buddhist and Advaita texts discuss doctrines from traditions that no longer exist.
18. Strong constructivists do not consider mystical experiences as having any cognitive value, but even if the depth-mystical experience is structured as constructivists argue, it could still in principle be cognitive—after all, scientific observations and sense-experience in general are structured, and yet they still lead to knowledge of the world. However, Steven Katz believes that because mystical claims cannot be verified on grounds independent of the mystical experiences themselves, they cannot be the grounds of any final assertions about the truth of any religious position: “no veridical proposition can be generated on the basis of mystical experience” (1978: 22).
19. Buddhists who disagree with fellow Buddhists (or Hindus with fellow Hindus) do not typically believe their opponents are not good Buddhists (or Hindus) or are heading toward hell, but only that their understanding is wrong and that their path is not as efficient, although in India there is more condemnation of other schools than many Westerners think.
20. There have been precursors of this. For example, Kabir in India attempted a type of universalism. However, it fostered hostilities and not tolerance, since he had to ignore many of the details of the practices and doctrines of specific traditions, and the more orthodox in Hinduism and Islam reacted negatively. So too, the Baha’i espouse one god that is seen differently in different cultures and have been subject to violent persecution.
21. Thus, even if there is a transcendent reality and all introvertive mystics experience that reality and merely interpret its nature differently, there is still no “esoteric unity” to all religions (contra Schuon 1975). Religions are genuinely different: they are encompassing ways of life with different goals and values—these cannot be dismissed as extraneous “exoteric” phenomena. And again, mystics from different traditions continue to dispute claims about the nature of the transcendent reality and human destiny.
22. “Inclusivism,” which selects one tradition as definitive and as providing the grounds for other religions to be soteriologically effective, is another approach. Inclusivists do not deny that doctrines conflict but assert that their tradition’s doctrines are best. This leads to a conflict of different inclusivisms. Those who believe in rebirth also usually do not try to convert others but let them follow their own tradition; this does not deny that there is a conflict of doctrines; it only means that they think others will eventually be reborn in their tradition.
23. Shankara said that the appeal to revealed authority (shruti) is necessary since philosophers constantly contradict each other (Brahma-sutra-bhashya 2.10–11). He also noted the objection that this itself is an instance of reasoning, but he still asserted that the Vedas, being eternal, provide the necessary true knowledge. He relied on the testimony of the Vedic seers, but as discussed in the last chapter he also insisted that even the Vedas needed interpretation when they did not conform to his nondualism.
24. Little to date has been done on mystical claims in the growing field of “virtue epistemology.”
25. Postmodernists’ relativism of rationality will be discussed in chapter 7.
26. Different beliefs may have different degrees of warrant. The question here is about the most basic doctrines in a mystical tradition on the nature of things.
27. This does not mean that one must be a naturalist today: naturalism is a metaphysical position based on sense-experience and science being the only means to knowledge of the world, but such a position is not deducible from scientific research or theorizing itself. One can rationally reject naturalistic metaphysics: one can accept transcendent knowledge-claims as long as those claims are consistent with science, and transcendent knowledge-claims are inherently consistent with science as long as the transcendent realities are not active in nature. Only an active theistic god would present an issue. Accepting an inactive ground of the universe or of the self could not be inconsistent with holding any scientific theories. (See also chap. 8.)
28. Walter Stace points out that consensus does not prove objectivity: we all may have a consensus on some illusions, such as mirages, but this does not make them part of the objective order of things (1967: 147–50). Stace’s conclusion is that mystical experiences are neither part of the “objective” order of the phenomenal world nor merely “subjective” (a mere product of the brain), but that mystics really have a direct experience of something beyond the world of space and time (ibid.: 147–52).
29. Advaitins claim that knowledge of Brahman trumps all our experience of diversity, thereby relegating all differentiated phenomena to the status of experiences in a dream. That is not irrational: this may in fact be the ultimate metaphysical status of things in this world—a transcendent reality may hold this world in existence, making the phenomenal world less than independently real. To say that it is “colossally false,” as Keith Yandell does (1993: 301), is no better than Samuel Johnson kicking a stone to refute Berkeley’s idealism. But critics also claim that Advaita has no explanation for why the root-ignorance (avidya) causing the apparent diversity should exist, or for who has that ignorance (since neither Brahman, which cannot have what is not real, nor persons who are ultimately not real can be its base). (See Jones 2014c: 141–54.) That Advaitins must classify all worldly phenomena as ontologically indeterminate (anirvachaniya) between real (sat) and totally nonexistent (asat) only confirms the opponents’ belief that Advaita metaphysics does not make sense. Theists have a related problem: if God already is in us, if God is nearer to me than I am to myself, as Eckhart said (2009: 334, 352), then why do we not know it?
30. To be rational, nonmystics must also be able to follow the mystics’ use of language to understand the claims—as Steven Phillips says, no one is warranted in believing a proposition that he or she does not understand (1986: 22). But such understanding seems possible (as discussed in chapter 6).
31. Does rationality apply to persons or to beliefs? Some beliefs may be inherently irrational to hold—e.g., traditionally it is claimed that a contradiction expresses nothing to believe consistently, and thus it would be irrational to hold a contradictory belief. (As discussed in chapter 7, dialetheists disagree concerning some beliefs.) But whether any belief is inherently rational is open to question. It seems that rationality is more a matter of whether a person is warranted to believe a proposition at a given time.
32. One cannot help but think that if Plantinga had been raised in another religion, he would be as adamant about that religion being the best religion. In fact, by simply changing the words “Christian” to “Muslim,” “Christianity” to “Islam,” and “Jesus” to “the Quran” in his essay on religious pluralism (2000: 437–57), it becomes a defense of Islamic exclusivism rather than Christian exclusivism. This shows the relativism of his argument.
33. For a contemporary version of the James/Clifford debate over belief and evidence, see Feldman and Warfield 2010.
34. Intuitions play a greater role in philosophy than is normally thought, and there is a surprising lack of rigorous argument even in contemporary philosophy (Gutting 2009).
35. On the problems of assessing worldviews, see Wainwright 1993, 1998.
1. The yogic state of samadhi in which the mind is empty became emphasized in later Vedanta and especially in the modern Neo-Vedanta, but in Shankara’s Advaita it is at best an aid to attaining enlightenment. For him, no yogic practice is necessary: enlightenment is a matter of correct knowledge during the awakened state, i.e., realizing what has always been the case about Brahman being our only reality. Thus, he tended to downplay yoga and any special experiences. But enlightenment for him, as in the Upanishads (see Jones 2014a: 173–84), is a matter of mystical knowledge by participation, not mere factual “knowledge that” something is the case.
2. Possible persisting effects of these experiences or long-term changes in experiencers outside of meditation, as would occur with mindfulness or as a possible after-effect of other mystical experiences, have also been the subject of a few follow-up studies (e.g., Doblin 1991).
3. There are areas of the brain that are affected by a “compassion pill” that is being developed. Meditation geared toward compassion may affect the same areas.
4. “Altered states of consciousness” involve, in the words of Charles Tart, a qualitative shift in the pattern of mental functioning (1969: 1). It may be that all altered states of consciousness result from activity in the same area of the brain (e.g., perhaps a decrease in prefrontal cortex activity) (Dietrich 2003) or have some mystical or visionary attributes (e.g., a sense of oneness with the phenomena around the experiencer, or ego-dissolution) (Dittrich 1998). Even if this is so, it will not help decide the epistemic issues connected to mystical experiences.
5. The principal difficulty for any “state-specific science” is whether one can keep the theory-directed attention necessary for scientific testing while remaining in the altered state of consciousness—e.g., concept-guided testing would destroy any mindfulness toward all phenomena.
6. For the prospects of an actual “science of consciousness,” see Hameroff, Kaszniak, & Scott 1996; Chalmers 2004.
7. A “reduction” is different from merely specifying the bodily mechanisms involved in an experience. We can understand the way the eye receives and the brain processes information without taking away from the experience and the importance of seeing (Goodman 2002: 270–71). And the same holds for specifying the mechanisms in the brain that function during a mystical experience. A reduction goes further and undercuts the cognitive significance of the experience: it specifies that all that is involved are those brain mechanisms. The experience is not denied but explained away. An explanatory reduction can affect how phenomena are described and what needs explaining. Thus, a reductionist may not feel compelled to explain all of the phenomenology of a mystical experience. (See Jones 2013: 152–92.)
8. See Horgan 2003 for a popular account; see Newberg & Lee 2005 for methodological issues in the neuroscientific study of religious experiences.
9. Some dismiss the prospect of finding anything unique about religion in our neurology, since religion is simply another cultural phenomenon (see Brown 2006). But the issue here is whether there is something unique in the neurology of mystical experiences, not religion or mysticism as ways of life.
10. Such drugs will be called “psychotropic” here, but the term is not perfect since not all psychotropic drugs are relevant. The term “psychotomimetic” has not entered general use. The term “psychedelic”—literally, “mind-opening” or “soul-revealing”—might seem better, but it has fallen into disrepute. “Hallucinogenic” and “entheogenic” are both question-begging concerning the issue of cognitivity, the first con (i.e., generating hallucinations) and the second pro (i.e., generating experiences of God).
11. Newberg, D’Aquili, & Rause also suggest that religion arose from mystical insights (2002: 133–40). But as noted in chapter 1, anthropologists today point to social and evolutionary factors as the sources of religion. There is evidence that children are predisposed to believe that all objects in the world are created by an agent for a purpose, and thus we may be predisposed to believe in gods. In addition, setting and beliefs matter for drug-induced mystical experiences, and so such beliefs may have preceded the experiences in early religion. Advocates of the entheogenic theory may revise their historical claim to drug experiences being either the source or a major reinforcement of the ideas of a soul independent of the body, life after death, heaven and hell, and forces behind nature.
12. One problem with drug testing is that scientists cannot administer a psychotropic drug to people without their consent because of the danger of very negative effects. Scientists cannot put LSD in people’s drinks without their knowledge and say “Well, it’s for science—we just wanted to see what would happen, and to get a disinterested result we couldn’t tell them about it in advance” without getting a lot of trouble. But this means that most participants in these studies are people seeking spiritual experiences; people with little interest in the subject are less likely to volunteer. This in turn means that scientists are not getting a true cross-section of the population, but mostly people already inclined to have mystical experiences, and even those uninterested in spiritual experiences are aware of the nature of the study, which may predispose them toward having such experiences. Thus, these studies are weighted toward producing spiritual experiences. Enthusiastic doctors or skeptical doctors can also affect the results of drug studies (Benson 1984: 78).
13. Apparently drugs do not induce introvertive mystical experiences as readily as extrovertive ones, and the mystical experiences they induce do not transform subjects as often as cultivated ones do, suggesting that the religious content of the experiences is not from the drugs’ effects alone. But some introvertive theistic experiences of a sense of being one with a reality, rather than a vision of a distinct entity, do occur.
14. Patrick McNamara (2009) argues that religious practices are grounded in the frontal lobes. If mystical experiences are grounded in other areas of the brain, any postexperience interpretations may involve areas other than those involved in the experiences.
15. For criticism of Freud’s theory of mysticism as regression and pathology, see Parsons 1999. On Freud and Jung’s reductionism, see Jones 2000: 232–34.
16. Apparently lesions to various areas of the brain may disrupt our sense of the flow of time, but they do not produce a sense of timelessness.
17. One theory attempts to explain all religious experiences as the result of religious existential crises that we attempt to solve with the cognitive structures located in the left hemisphere: when we cannot solve a crisis, the brain switches to the nonlinguistic right hemisphere, which then restructures the left hemisphere’s activity and leads to a resolution, but the resolution seems to have an ineffable element (Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis 1993). But the question here is whether there are neurologically special mystical experiences.
18. Naturalists thus will argue that biological explanations of mystical experiences counter the claim to insight in a way that biological explanations of sense-experiences do not: in the latter case, we can corroborate claims about an external source (sense-objects), and so the physiology of perception is irrelevant; but in the former case, there is no object to present to others and so how the experiences arise becomes important. But to argue this, naturalists must then concede that factors other than scientific explanations alone matter (here, third-party corroboration)—scientific explanations cannot be used simply by themselves as evidence against mystical claims.
19. Different types of scientific and sociocultural natural explanations compete with each other. For example, if Karl Marx offers the correct explanation of the mechanisms that are really at work in religious phenomena, then Sigmund Freud’s psychological account is incorrect and neuroscientific accounts are at best irrelevant. One may make the accounts compatible by limiting the scope of each theory. For example, Marx explains why some groups are more likely to produce mystics, Freud explains which members of those groups are more likely to have mystical experiences, and some neuroscientific accounts explain the bodily mechanisms for the those experiences.
20. Theists may insist that the phenomenology of mystical experiences will in fact differ if God infuses the experiencer with something, rather than if an experiencer simply has natural phenomena in his or her mind during the experience. But it is hard to see how theists could establish this: wherever the differentiations in differentiated experiences come from, there is no reason to suspect that they would not cause the same effect, and the empty depth-mystical experience would remain empty.
21. The same is also true with other types of experiences. For example, does the fact that a society where a belief in rebirth is generally accepted is more likely to produce children who tell of being reborn prove that the stories are untrue? We could just as easily turn the situation around: parents in societies that do not have a prevailing belief in rebirth would tend to dismiss their children’s stories of their former lives as daydreams, and if the children persisted in talking about them the parents would tend to tell the children to grow up. That is, societies with the belief tend to encourage such accounts, and societies without it would tend to suppress them—how then do the prevailing social beliefs bear one way or the other on whether the stories are true or not?
22. Memories of what occurs during epileptic seizures have been documented to be unreliable (Greyson et al. 2014: 12). Mystical experiences during seizures also appear to be less likely to have lasting effects.
23. It should be pointed out that there is an obvious flaw in Mario Beauregard’s own scientific work: he ran neuroscans on nuns who were asked to relive their prior mystical experiences, not while they were actually having mystical experiences. This may tell us something about the areas of the brain connected to memory or emotions, but it is not even indirectly studying mystical experiences themselves.
24. Sloan is under the impression that in describing mystical experiences as “real,” Newberg and d’Aquili mean that these experiences are genuine encounters with a transcendent reality and not delusions (2006: 249–50). However, all they mean by “real” is that mystical experiences are genuine neurological events and not merely wishful thinking (e.g., Newberg, d’Aquili, & Rause 2002: 7). They remain neutral on whether these experiences are authentic encounters with a transcendent reality or are delusions (e.g., ibid.: 143, 178–79). They do postulate a transcendent “Absolute Unity Being” as real, based on it seeming “vividly and convincingly real,” and even more real than the ordinary world after the experience is over when the experiencer has returned to dualistic consciousness. They also believe they saw “evidence of a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is” (ibid.: 9). But they realize that none of their patients claimed this, that this is only their theory, and that this is a separate claim from the experiences being genuine neurological events. Sloan’s general position that scientific studies of religion reduce religion to something other than what it is or “trivialize the transcendent” is hard to support: merely looking at the measurable physiological effects of religion (if possible) does not make the effects a substitute for religion or otherwise reduce religion to something it is not. Letting themselves be studied does not reduce meditators to objects or otherwise dehumanize them. Meditators can also acknowledge the biological effects while still maintaining that their objective is quite different from anything scientists measure, just as they can agree that the depth-mystical experience lasts a certain amount of time, while it seemed timeless to them. Nor would scientific study trivialize the transcendent aspects of religion, although the religious, as Sloan says, may object to “putting God to the test.”
25. An early critic of EEG studies of meditators, Peter Fenwick, pointed out that there be other sources for the changes attributed to meditation. For example, changes from a mystical training program may be responsible (1987: 116).
26. John Hick, in criticizing neuroscientific studies of mystics in general, wanted to define “mystical experience” more broadly, in terms of the transformed state of an experiencer—a more diffuse “sense of being in the presence of God” during a continuing enlightened state—and not in terms of unusual momentary neurological episodes that scientists study (2006: 80). He dismissed epileptic seizures or stimulated experiences as anything like true mystical experiences, except in the formal sense that these experiencers see their experiences in terms of religious concepts (ibid.: 71). Nevertheless, the study of the momentary episodes is certainly legitimate—even Hick conceded that there may be momentary “glimpses” of a spiritual dimension to nature (ibid.: 77). Such episodes can be studied by scientists, and this may tell us something about how the brain works.
27. The effects of mystical and near-death experiences are often similar—e.g., causing a sense of cosmic connectedness and a loss of fear of death (see Greyson 1993, 2014).
28. There may also be physiological similarities between meditative states and sleep states (see Cahn & Polich 1999), but meditators remain aware. So too, concentrative meditation and mindfulness meditation apparently differ from ordinary states of relaxation (Dunn, Hartigan, & Mikulas 1999).
29. One conceptual problem is that the phrase “naturalist explanation” can have two meanings: the scientific account (a natural explanation) or one possible philosophical conclusion (a naturalist reduction). Naturalists do not always distinguish the two clearly. Nevertheless, only by confusing the two can one conclude that scientific accounts by themselves logically entail the philosophical conclusion. The naturalists’ conclusion is a philosophical position and must be defended as such. A naturalist reduction is not a scientific argument—naturalists cannot only cite science itself for their contention that only what is in principle open to scientific scrutiny is real. The defense of the truth of their position will have to rest on other considerations.
30. In the field of the neuroscientific study of mystical experiences are many advocates for or against mystical experiences. These proponents tend to give at most only a brief account of their opponents’ position and to ignore any data or theories that conflict with their position. For example, Beauregard & O’Leary (2007) do not discuss the significance of drug-induced mystical experiences to the issue of whether mystical experiences can be duplicated. They find it more important to discuss out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, but here too they ignore studies that conflict with their position.
31. Herbert Benson believes that we are “wired for God,” but he realizes that his study of the concentrative meditative technique he labels the “relaxation response” is neutral on the issue of whether a god exists. He believes faith in God is good for our health, whether it is a god or evolution that produced the wiring that resulted in this faith. He also believes that if his Relaxation Response is combined with deep personal beliefs, it can help an individual achieve an internal environment that can help the individual reach enhanced states of well-being and health, regardless of what those cultural beliefs are (1984: 5, 8, 81, 101).
32. Neuroscientists sometimes miss philosophical issues. For example, Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg cannot simply substitute their theory of an abstract “Absolute Unitary Being” for their patients’ claims (2002: 120). Nor can they automatically equate “the state of pure mind of an awareness beyond object and subject” with that reality, or equate that reality with God, nirvana, and other religiously specific concepts (contra Newberg 2010: 258). More argument is needed; it is not enough to note that an “Absolute Unitary Being” transcends the natural realm and that traditionally in the West, this can only mean God. “Absolute Unitary Being” is only their explanatory posit—none of their subjects report achieving a state of being one with it while being observed. Based on their empirical findings, their posit is not a personal being with thoughts and concerns, nor does it have the traditional attributes of a personal theistic god. Nor is a “vivid” subjective sense that what is experienced is real (1999: 191–93) the only criterion for what is objectively real, especially when there are other types of experiences with possible third-person testing. Even Newberg concedes this in another context (2010: 252). D’Aquili and Newberg attempt to distinguish mystical experiences from hallucinations by arguing that people experiencing the former retain their vivid sense of reality after the experience, while those experiencing the latter do not. But the experiences of people suffering from schizophrenia may seem real to them even after their episodes—we reject their claims because they do not conform to the consensus sense of ordinary reality (also see Stace 1960a: 140–41). So too, visual delusions can be ruled out by third-person checking. Introvertive mystical experiences have no such checking procedure, since the alleged realities experienced transcend the natural realm.
33. The brain apparently has more plasticity than was once believed—it can structurally rearrange itself in response to events—and meditation is one way that we can rewire the brain (see Newberg & Waldman 2009). The brain can be retrained to manage destructive emotions and to activate neurological centers associated with happiness, well-being, and compassion (McMahan 2008: 205).
34. Matthew Bagger voices the view of most naturalists when he says: “The logic of naturalism appears insurmountable: how can one ever hope to demonstrate that some event or anomaly in principle resists naturalistic explanation?” (1999: 227). But the issue is not whether the mechanics of any experience is open to a scientific explanation, but whether that explanation is exhaustive of all of the experience. How can naturalists prove that the scientific explanation is the complete explanation of all aspects of the experience?
35. Whether this conclusion can be expanded to other types of experiences, such as “out-of-body” and “near-death” experiences—i.e., whether being able to trigger these experiences in a laboratory means they are nothing but brain activity—will not be examined here.
36. Some have questioned Alister Hardy’s methodology and his conclusion that mystical experiences occur in a significant portion of the population. And many such surveys are worded in way that makes it hard to see if genuinely mystical experiences are involved—the details needed to see if a mystical experience is in fact involved are missing (e.g., being “lifted out of yourself” may be construed by a participant to mean any spiritually uplifting experience). But even if, say, only 1 percent of the population has had mystical experiences, that would mean that a few million people in the United States have had mystical experiences of one type or another and one degree or another.
1. Anthropologists claim that the notion of a “supernatural” reality is a modern invention. Instead, members of premodern societies experience the world differently than people the modern world. The gods were part of the natural world—Thor did not cast thunderbolts from another realm; rather, he was simply the power of thunder and lightning personified. But mystical experiences may be one source of the idea that there are transcendent realities.
2. Naturalists believe that the burden of proof on whether transcendent realities exist is clearly on those who advocate such realities since we all agree that the natural world exists. But naturalists do not assert merely that the natural world exists—they assert that only the natural world exists. Thus, they are competing on the same level of metaphysics with advocates of transcendent realities.
3. But as mystical traditions develop, unexperiencable entities may be posited for explanatory purposes. It is an unmystical activity, but mystics need to create a picture of reality to ground their way of life, and this includes topics outside of mystical experiences. For example, Abhidharma Buddhists posited discrete particles of matter (paramanus) that are unopen to sense-experience. Such particles simply did not affect the impermanence that Buddhists are interested in—the impermanence of the experienced realm related to suffering (dukkha)—but the posits hold a role in the total world-picture.
4. The speculative and often elaborate metaphysics of visionaries—including mystically minded ones such as Jakob Boehme—are another matter. So too with systems based on other experiences, such as the Indian Kundalini physiology devised to explain various types of experiences.
5. Mystical timelessness should not be confused with eternity: in mystical experiences, the phenomenal continuum of all time is not condensed into one moment; rather, temporal categories of “past” and “future” do not structure what is experienced in introvertive or extrovertive mystical experiences. So too with space: space is transcended in that spatial relations are not related to the beingness of things; all of extended space is not condensed into one spatial point. But all of the one depth-beingness common to all is present entirely in each “now” and “here.” Thus, Eckhart speaks of there being only one “now”—all “nows” are the same.
6. Thus, no mystical experience is needed to see a unity to nature. Such naturalist wholeness may seem like the oneness of some depth-mystical systems, but to Advaitins all that naturalists consider real is an illusory “dream” realm, not what is truly real—a nonobjective, objectless consciousness. So too, Plotinus distinguishes the One from the realm of Being.
7. Naturalists also ignore the whole issue of what is “beingness” or its nature—e.g., in W. V. Quine’s criterion, “to be is to be the value of a variable.”
8. Yogachara Buddhism is often portrayed as an idealism that denies the phenomenal world as “mind only.” However, in this school it is only our mental creations that are mind only, like visualizations. Under their analysis, perception does not occur from an interaction with external objects. However, at least early Yogacharins were giving a phenomenological account of changes in consciousness during experiences and bracketing the ontic issue of external causes. They remained agnostic about the question of external reality.
9. That all things are connected does not necessarily mean that all things are constituted by other things, internally interconnected, or mutually dependent. The analogy of “Indra’s web” from Hwa Yen Buddhism in which each gem is constituted by each other gem is theorizing by one school that goes beyond any extrovertive experience of connectedness.
10. The “oneness” of beingness may be ambiguous. In introvertive mysticism, it would make sense to speak of all beingness being identical (i.e., the same dimensionless beingness is in each phenomenon), while in extrovertive mysticism it would make sense to speak of all beingness being the same nature (i.e., different parts of an extended beingness). Everything may be of the same nature to naturalists (i.e., everything now in the great expansion of space is the product of the Big Bang), but a transcendent source of the universe is partless and so the beingness of everything is identical.
11. In introvertive mysticism, the situation is inverted. From Eckhart: “The more someone knows the root and kernel and the ground of the Godhead as one, the more he knows all things” (McGinn 2001: 49).
12. As noted in chapter 8, in the nearest word for “matter” in Buddhism—“form” (rupa)—the emphasis is on how we experience things, not things as they exist independently of us. Abhidharma analysis may have started as only a phenomenological analysis of experiences without any ontic claims—i.e., analyzing how the world appears to us and not how it is in itself—but this evolved in different traditions into ontic claims about what exists.
13. It should be pointed out that Madhyamaka Buddhists speak of the “emptiness [shunyata] of things,” not “Emptiness” with a capital “E” as if it is a distinct reality or the transcendent source of phenomena. They do not speak of “experiencing emptiness [shunyata]” or “becoming Emptiness.” Rather, the enlightened see that phenomena and the self are empty of any sort of self-existence (svabhava). If one treats emptiness as any type of entity, one is incurable (Mula-madhyamaka-karikas 13.8). In sum, emptiness is not a reality of any kind, let alone something like Brahman or God (see Jones 2014b: 136–43).
14. Theravada Buddhists exempt space (akasha) and nirvana from being compounded and conditioned by other elements (Anguttara Nikaya 1.286).
15. Only the transcendent God or Brahman is fully real to orthodox Hindus. The divine is untouched by the pollution of the world, and the natural universe is ultimately unimportant (Nelson 1998: 81). Thus, every day Indians can dump millions of gallons of raw sewage, hundreds of incompletely cremated corpses, and huge amounts of chemical waste into the sacred Ganges River, and yet say, in the words of a Benares taxi driver, “The Ganges is God and [God] can’t be polluted” (ibid.: 80).
16. In classical Hinduism, the god Brahma is the first being that is emanated when each new world-cycle “rolls out,” and he mistakenly thinks he is the creator of all that emanates after him.
17. The earlier Advaitin Gaudapada was a realist concerning the phenomenal world: it is the “radiance” of Brahman and as such is Brahman and is real. See Jones 2014c: 127–30. To Shankara, the phenomenal realm is not an emanation of anything in any sense.
18. The criterion for reality for Advaita is being permanent and thus eternally existing. Thus, for consciousness to constitute the only reality, it must exist at all times, even when we are in dreamless sleep. Thus, dreamless sleep must be considered a conscious state. On whether dreamless sleep is a state of consciousness, see Smith 2000a: 70–71.
19. Even if the sense of meaning arises from areas of brain connected to emotion rather than cognition—e.g., the limbic structures (Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998: 179)—this does not mean that no cognition of beingness is part of the total experience.
20. Whether “being” is a property is an issue for the Ontological Argument, but it is irrelevant here: depth-mystics here allegedly experience the sheer “that-ness” of God.
21. Brihadaranyaka Up. 3.7.23; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus 5.633. To Shankara, consciousness is not an object; thus, it is not a phenomenon, which by definition is an object of consciousness; the mind is only one of the senses, and so any idealism that would reduce all “objective” phenomena to the mind alone is ruled out.
22. To characterize Samkhya-Yoga as a “solipsistic mysticism” (Stoeber 1994: 95) is also an error: the world in this metaphysics in no way depends on any individual’s consciousness or existence—in short, the world does not cease to exist when I do. The eternal material world (prakriti) continues with the enlightenment of individuals (purushas).
23. No mystical tradition claims that human beings are closer to a transcendent reality than inanimate objects for being conscious (since all things share the same being). To Advaita, the mind is just another phenomenon in the illusion.
24. Nor can Brahman be characterized as a “panpsychism” since it is partless. Nor can what had a beginning—a creation—be the body of an eternal god. Contemporary theological ideas of “panentheism” would also encounter the problem of making the world part of God.
25. Any notion of the evolution of consciousness is foreign to classical mystical traditions. For them, consciousness is eternal and unchanging.
26. This presents a problem: if our true “self” is changeless, then what does such a self do? Everything that constitutes a person—our body, emotions, sense-experience, and in fact the entire content of consciousness—all changes. How does this self differ from beingness?
27. Edward Conze claimed that the Buddha, for all his talk of “no self,” did not mean to deny the existence of a transcendent self—he was merely denying that there is any self in our field of dualistic experience. That is, the Buddha’s negative teachings were only meant to deny that anything worldly is the self. Thus, when the Buddha said “There is no self,” what he meant was that “Others teach you what the self is; I teach you what the self is not (an-atman) to clear the mind of images.” That Conze leaned toward perennial philosophy may be the reason that he, like perennial philosophers, accepted a transcendent self.
28. Combining pantheism with a dimensionless transcendent source only leads to absurdities: for example, this desk is ontologically only the source, which is ontologically the source of each other phenomenal item, and so this desk is ontologically identical to this chair—which it is obviously is not.
29. How a mystic could re-emerge with his or her individuality intact after being one with the One is an issue for Plotinus and other emanationists. How does any individuality occur in the initial emanation? And how does it remain after a mystical merging with the One? Each person could retain his or her previous individuality after a mystical experience only if the individuality of each phenomenon is in some way real.
30. In the thirteenth century in the West, the Christian Richard Fishacre made a similar claim to explain how God could be omnipresent without being spatial: God is a reality transcending the universe and so he transcends any sense of spatiality, just as he is timeless; being spaceless, God can exist entirely in every part of space. But this “transcendent God entirely in every part” doctrine never became mainstream within Christianity. Today holograms might be used as a model, but there are problems when they are applied to mystical transcendent realities: holograms involve more than one element (the hologram, a target plate, and a coherent light source to produce the images); holograms may be “partless” in one sense, but they are spatial and have detailed structure, while mystical transcendent realities are nonspatial and free of structure; the holographic image mirrors the structure of the hologram, while mystical realities have no structure to mirror; thinking about the details of a complex analogy such as this entrenches the image in one’s mind and directs the mind away from the transcendent reality. (Also see Jones 1986: 191–92.) A nonduality such as Advaita’s cannot utilize this model since the being of the hologram, the projection plate, and the light source are all Brahman; and the emphasis in holography is on structure, not structureless being. The analogy would also encode the illusion of maya in the reality of Brahman, which Advaitins reject.
1. Some mystical texts are deliberately esoteric (e.g., many Tantric texts are written in code) to protect certain alleged knowledge from the general public. So too, there are views of language as a creative force—e.g., language as the means of God’s creation of the world in Jewish mysticism, or as the “act of truth” in Indian thought. But the problem here is the more general one of the cognitive statements directed to the unenlightened.
2. No language is “more mystical” than another since all will have the same basic problem. Indian mystical traditions may have developed more distinctions for different states of consciousness than Western ones, but this does not make Sanskrit more mystical—it only shows that it could be utilized to express the distinctions important to meditative progress. Any language could add terms for what its users find important, as with the Eskimos having many terms for different states of snow.
3. A commonly proffered neurological explanation of ineffability (e.g., Persinger 1987) is that mystical experiences are the product of the right hemisphere of our brain, while our linguistic and analytical abilities are a product of our left hemisphere; the total disconnect between the two in mystical experiences means that the left hemisphere has nothing to express and mystics are simply left with a vague sense of experiencing something profound that transcends what can be conceptualized. Thus, all conceptualizations are unconnected to the actual experiences and come only from the mystics’ religious traditions (as constructivists believe). However, mystics do not allege vagueness.
4. There is also evidence that even sense-experiences occur slightly before cognition and the translation of the awareness into language (Newberg & Waldman 2009: 75).
5. It is adherence to the mirror theory of language that makes philosophers say things like “Declaring ‘reality is inexpressible’ means it is something that is expressible—i.e., it is an object with the property of ‘being inexpressible,’ ” or “To declare that x is ineffable, we must have identified x as an object.” Thus, we cannot even deny something has phenomenal properties or deny the existence of anything without giving it some phenomenal property and conventional existence. That is, if we say something has no phenomenal properties or does not exist, it becomes an “it” that can be talked about like any object. Reading the structure of a statement into reality just by speaking of “it” is the essence of the mirror theory of language. In Bertrand Russell’s example, the statement “It is raining” leads to the idea that there is an “it” independent of the rain that does the raining.
6. Wittgenstein also said that there are things that cannot be put into words but that make themselves manifest (Tractatus, Prop. 6.522). He said that is “the mystical,” but this has nothing to do with mystical experiences or altered states of consciousness—it is a philosophical point following from his mirror theory about what in the phenomenal world has no linguistic structure. Perhaps he meant the beingness of the world.
7. By definition, we cannot have any model or conception of reality that does not involve human conceptions—we cannot have a conception that is independent of our perspectives and capacities. But that does not mean that we cannot state things about the ultimate nature of things. Whether Madhyamaka Buddhists believe the highest truths can be stated is a point of contention. The Buddhism Pali canon makes a distinction between scriptures of final meaning (nitartha) and those of provisional meaning (neyartha). The former give plain and definitive statements of Buddhist truths (e.g., that all things are without a self), while the latter give statements that would mislead if taken literally and must be understood in light of the former (e.g., the Buddha using “I”). This led to the Mahayana distinction between statements from the point of view of highest matters (paramarthatas) explicating the true nature of things and conventional truths (samvriti-satyas) in which conventional entities (including a self) are provisionally accepted. Nagarjuna’s position seems to be that we need the enlightening wisdom/insight (prajna) to know that ultimate truths are true, but the truths are statable (see Jones 2014b: 151–57)—i.e., “All of reality is empty of self-existence” is an absolute truth, even though conventional terms must be utilized to state it.
8. Meister Eckhart said that to be empty of all images is still to have them but to have them without attachment (2009: 77). Perhaps this is what he meant by that.
9. Also note that we can experience the three-dimensional cube as it is and are not limited by our two-dimensional representations. That is, our awareness of the real cube is not constrained by the drawing—indeed, it is not affected by the conceptualization at all. Similarly, there is no reason to believe that the mystics’ conceptualizations restrict what they experience, contrary to what constructivists believe. (Steven Katz believes ineffability is only a protective strategy advanced by mystics—a deliberate mystification to conceal the preexisting conceptual content of the experiences and to try to prevent it from being rationally analyzed [1978: 54]. But it is difficult to explain why such a protective strategy would be adopted spontaneously in every culture of the world and every era or why it would be needed in any culture before modernity since such cultures valued transcendent realities.)
10. The importance seen in what is experienced and its otherness leads to likening the experiences to emotions (e.g., James 1958: 292–93), but the problem with language is actually related to cognitivity and expressing what is allegedly known.
11. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously ended his Tractatus with the same point: “What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.” But this is a logical point following from his mirror view of language and is not in any way about any mystical experience.
12. Wittgenstein argued that there can be no private language: any language by its very nature must be something that others can understand. Thus, even if someone does not communicate his or her new language to others, it is still “public” by its nature: to be meaningful, it must in principle be communicable to others. But even if there could be a private language, the basic problem for mysticism of how any language works would apply. Nor is the problem here about translating a private language into a public one. Nor is there a “state-specific” language in the depth-mystical experience that cannot be translated into the language of ordinary consciousness: language is necessarily differentiated, and there is an absence of anything differentiated in that experience.
13. The problem mentioned in chapter 4 that mystics may simply use the idioms of their culture that do not truly reflect their experiences (e.g., “union with God” when no personal elements are given in the experience) points to another way that the unenlightened may be misled by mystical utterances. And the use of the familiar may more firmly implant objects in the minds of the unenlightened.
14. Religious symbols are often said to “participate” in what is symbolized. For example, rituals participate in the creative acts of a god, or the bread and wine of communion for Protestants become the body and blood of Christ in a symbolic sense, or religious art reflects the structure of what is imagined in a way words do not. But this idea is not applicable to mystical discourse, with the possible exception of “Om” being Brahman.
15. Personal imagery is also probably necessary for a theistic life in place of any conception of an impersonal and inactive ground of reality, e.g., Eckhart’s simple Godhead that does not act or Paul Tillich’s being-itself. Thus, any thorough negation of attributes of God probably would not lead to a satisfying religious life for theists.
16. Antirealists in the philosophy of science raise the same problem with any scientific theories, which also of necessity must make use of ordinary, everyday conceptions.
17. Nonmystical theologians (e.g., Aquinas) can also emphasize that all discourse about transcendent realities must be metaphoric. Immanuel Kant also said in his Critique of Judgment that “All our knowledge of God is symbolic”—to treat symbols literally leads to anthropomorphism, but to deny them leads to a deism “by which nothing at all is cognized.”
18. Theologians have trouble reconciling mystical simplicity with the human attributes that theists value. For example, how can God be timeless and immutable but also compassionate? Anselm and Aquinas argued that God “acts as if he felt compassion although he does not actually do so” or “has something akin to joy and delight in creation” but does not “feel” the way creatures do (since an immutable reality has no emotions) or “is touched by our suffering” but not in the “usual sense” or “experiences a torturer’s joy at torturing but not in the way the torturer experiences it.” But all of this begins to sound forced and very strange. To suggest that a god can have “compassion” or “suffer” and not feel these states renders the use of these terms meaningless. Theistic intuitions are simply conflicting: theists want a god who is unchanging but also touched by love and suffering. Theists cannot have it both ways, but they do not want to give up either point.
19. Any symbol would require specification in literal terms to show why it is appropriate. The theologian Paul Tillich said that all religious statements are symbolic except “God is being-itself,” which is literally true and so can anchor symbolic claims (1957: 238). The mystical objection to this is that God may still be construed as an object among objects.
20. William Alston thinks that talk of God is not “strictly true,” but it is “close enough to the strict truth” to be useable in a religious life; Christians can also appeal to revelations to vouchsafe their use (2011: 108–9). What is being argued here is that some terms are intended in their literal sense, but a god is not a phenomenal object (and hence has no body and so on) and is seen as more perfect, and so a metaphoric extension will always be needed.
21. In introducing the notion of apophatic discourse into Christianity, Dionysius actually used the term “apophatic” very little and instead used the term “denial” (aphairesis) to remove the notion that God has anything phenomenal about him and to affirm something greater about him than anything phenomenal.
22. Eckhart also said the opposite: God (but not the nameless Godhead) is omni-nameable (see Harmless 2008: 118–19). In Islam, there are traditionally ninety-nine names of Allah, plus one unspeakable name.
23. The Ontological Argument and mathematics are often considered “mystical,” even though they are clearly products of the analytical mind’s thought and perhaps thought-inspired intuitions but without any mystical states of consciousness. Anselm may have come up with the intuition for the argument in an altered state of consciousness, but the argument is still a paradigm of the work of the analytical mind: Anselm’s being may be “greater than we can conceive,” but the argument proceeds by comparing our conceptions. The argument also makes our conceptions central in what God must be—e.g., God cannot do evil or be morally neutral because we think being moral is better. To put it crudely, the creator cannot be evil or even morally neutral because we do not like that, and so a creator must be moral. (Also see Jones 1993: 149–66.) Theology may well overwhelm a mystical experience in our understanding of a transcendent reality once we begin thinking this way.
24. It is understandable that satya is considered unstatable in Indian thought since the concept conflates both truth and reality. Thus, the statability of a truth is denied because reality is other than any words. That is, the reality of actually drinking water is clearly not a verbal act, but the truth “Water quenches thirst” is clearly statable; since the concept “satya” covers both, satya may be claimed to be unstatable.
1. Fritz Staal concludes that the claim of Buddhist irrationality does not withstand examination (1975: 49, 54). He also argues that the law of noncontradiction is explicitly stated and adhered to in Advaita (1962: 68). Overall, he concludes that Asian “mystical doctrines in general are rational” (1975: 40). He also notes that philosophy in India is tied more to the dichotomy of “expressible” versus “inexpressible” than to “rational” versus “irrational” (1988: 213).
2. Logic was not a major topic among nonmystics in classical non-Western cultures either, although there was some work in India and China on the nature of arguments and deductions that would qualify as the study of logic. Such studies were tied more closely to theories of language than mathematics. In China the early Moists discussed proper arguments, but they had little influence on the rest of Chinese philosophy (see Hansen 1983). Not all philosophy in India has soteriological goals, but discussions of the nature of reasoning also occur in mystical traditions. In Madhyamaka Buddhism, Bhavaviveka made valid reasoning (yukti) a major topic (see Jones 2011b: 195–207). There is also a tradition of “Buddhist logicians”—the label is somewhat misleading, but they did discuss reasoning, inference (anumana), and other means to correct knowledge (pramanas). The Buddhist logicians’ theory of meaning based on excluding everything that is not intended by a word (apoha) also implicitly relies on the laws of the excluded middle and noncontradiction even if there are no “real” (isolated and self-existent) referents. The study of reasoning developed in India from its tradition of debates (vadas). Indeed, the history of philosophy in India might be better seen in terms of continuing debates about certain topics rather than looking at different schools (darshanas) as stagnant entities. Learning debate practices and the means of correct knowledge was a standard part of training in all the philosophical schools. Nagarjuna exemplifies a type of debate in which one can deny a thesis without admitting a counterthesis (see Matilal 1998). In particular, see his Overturning the Objections (Jones 2014b: 38–53), which is a work only of philosophical arguments.
3. The fundamental premises of any belief-system may be held open to examination, but ultimately there does not appear to be any noncircular way to justify them—there is no neutral, agreed-on criteria to decide between worldviews (see Wainwright 1993). All reasoning thus comes to an end at some point, and what is accepted as an ultimate explanation remains a nonrational choice. Thus, no choice between competing ways of life is ever fully rational. So too, there are limits to rational argument about matters of ultimate metaphysical commitments for mystics and nonmystics alike. If holding all of one’s beliefs open to critical examination is a requirement of rationality, then most people are not completely rational, since it is difficult for anyone truly to criticize their own most fundamental and deeply held beliefs in their encompassing way of life. But the question here is whether mystics can argue and behave rationally within their own framework.
4. Many philosophers push back against postmodernism and argue for the general universality of reason (e.g., Nagel 1997). The postmodern position against applying “Western” standards of rationality universally began with Peter Winch’s application of Wittgenstein’s thought to the issue. Rationality for postmodernists is simply the ability to follow the internal rules embedded in a given culture. More general issues of epistemic relativism will not be discussed. Even if mystics’ premises differ, there still may be some cultural epistemic universals—mysticism does not resolve that issue (see Jones 1993: 73–77). Jainas and the Daoist Zhuangzi made a pluralism of equal but conflicting perspectives part of their epistemic framework for at least phenomenal knowledge. But Jainas and Zhuangzi do advocate some claims as true regardless of a limited point of view and also some points about how to live while rejecting others. For Zhuangzi, the “axis of the Way” (daoshu) provides a perspective from which all claims made from more limited points of view can be accepted as partial but not absolute truths.
5. Different cultures catalog the content of the worlds differently. Benjamin Whorf (1956) advanced the thesis that there are “implicit metaphysics” in the grammatical structure of different languages and that these background linguistic systems shape ideas, not merely voice them. Particular languages therefore shape how we reason. Thus, in “Standard Average European,” things (objects) and being (emphasized in verbs) predominate, while in Hopi events do, and so mutual translations are impossible. However, there are two problems with this. First, very different metaphysics are still statable in the same language (Plato and Aristotle, Parmenides and Heraclitus). Nor did the grammar inhibit the change from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum physics. The Hopi language may have a cyclical sense of time implicit in it, but classical Hindus also had a cyclical, not linear, sense of time, even though their language (Sanskrit) was Indo-European. Second, even if, for example, Chinese were not translatable into English, we still may be able to explain Chinese ideas in English—it may take longer explanations if no one-to-one substitution of terms is possible, but English grammar does not keep us from understanding Chinese thought. Whorf himself was able to express in English how the Hopi see the world (also see Jones 1993: 254–55 nn. 2–4). Thus, the influence that a particular type of language may have on our thought is greatly limited, if existent at all, and not a barrier to different types of metaphysics.
6. While Nisbett says that Daoism and later Buddhism shaped the Chinese orientation to life (2003: 12–17), he did not refer to mystical experiences as the cause of the general East Asian approach to the world. If mysticism influenced Asian religious traditions more than Western ones, it may only be because how Asians already thought permitted greater influence from mystical experiences of beingness and connectedness.
7. Whorf claimed that the “laws of correct thinking” are not universal but only reflect the background character of Indo-European languages (1956: 211). But at least Chinese can handle the Aristotelian logical propositions (Nakamura 1956; Hansen 1983: 10–23).
8. Developing nonstandard logics or artificial languages with an alternative logic has only a limited relevance to the question of whether the basic rules of logic are embedded in all actual cultures. But just as alternative geometries have proven useful in science, perhaps a viable alternative logic might be possible and valuable for other selected purposes. However, if mystical paradoxes can be explained as is done here, no new logic would need to be developed for mysticism.
9. Saying claims of faith transcend reason may mean that they cannot be supported by reasons based on events in the everyday world, but John of the Cross does say that these claims do not conflict with reason.
10. Marguerite Porete may seem more extreme: for her, reason must be “destroyed” or “must die” to attain true love. But the point for both women is that the ordinary life of virtue is not enough and must be transcended, and thus reason has no role left to play at that stage. And Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls is itself free of logical contradictions.
11. Setting aside a question as unanswered is one of four ways of addressing questions in early Buddhism. The other three are a direct reply, analysis of the question, and a counterquestion (Digha Nikaya 3.229; Anguttara Nikaya 1.197, 2.46).
12. J. Robert Oppenheimer did something similar with the questions of whether an electron’s position changes over time or not, or moves, or remains at rest, by answering “no” to each option (Smith 1976: 107).
13. So too, the Buddha giving provisional answers to listeners who are unprepared to understand the ultimately correct answer or distinguishing between a provisional level of truth and an ontologically correct one is not to assert contradictory claims or to be irrational. Teaching one doctrine to some listeners and the correct doctrine to others, or apparently affirming the existence of objects in the “skillful means” (upaya-kaushala) used to lead the unenlightened, resolves in the same fashion. The issue for rationality is whether the ultimate claims can be stated in a noncontradictory manner. And for this issue, these Buddhist strategies are not illogical as long as one doctrine is advanced as the ultimate truth and can be stated consistently.
14. Inconsistencies do occur. For example, Mundaka Upanishad states that the self can be grasped by austerity (3.1.5), and then a few verses later says it cannot be grasped by austerity (3.1.8). That is a contradiction unless different speakers are speaking in each verse.
15. Paradoxes can also come up in other contexts in mysticism, e.g., as part of training. For example, in a string of paradoxes, John of the Cross said, “In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing” (Ascent of Mount Caramel 1.13.11). But paradoxes in making assertions about what is experienced in mystical experiences will be the focus here.
16. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” But the essay makes clear that he only meant that we should not believe that we cannot change our mind on a topic over time—e.g., if we believed something at age twenty, we are not required to believe it at age sixty—not that we can be inconsistent at one moment.
17. The method used here to try to understand paradoxes or other alleged absurdities is to begin with a mystic’s central doctrines and then use them to make sense of the paradoxes. Thomas Kuhn suggests the reverse: first try to make sense of the absurdities, and then use your understanding to understand the central passages (1977: xii). Although the danger of imposing our understanding on others is not eliminated by the method used here, the danger appears greater with his method: under his approach, we would begin the very process of understanding by imposing our own contemporary understanding on the parts of a thinker’s work that are most difficult to understand—our understanding then may well taint our understanding of all of a mystic’s work.
18. The alleged paradox that the state of the enlightened (nirvana) is the same as the realm of rebirths (samsara) is based on a misunderstanding. (On the Heart Sutra’s equation form and emptiness, see Jones 2012c: 224–26.) Neither Prajnaparamita texts nor Nagarjuna ever said that nirvana and samsara are the same. Nagarjuna did say that there is not the slightest difference between the two (MK 25.19–20). This is commonly taken to mean that samsara and nirvana are simply two ways of looking at reality—one way with a sense of self and one without. But for Nagarjuna only self-existent realities could be either the same or different, and since nirvana and samsara, like everything else, are empty of self-existence they cannot be the same or different (see Jones 2014b: 143–44). It is one thing to say that a tree and a car are not different in their ontic nature because each is empty of self-existence; it is another altogether to say a tree is a car. To equate samsara and nirvana is to miss the Buddhist analysis entirely.
19. One of the philosophical puzzles connected to translation is whether translators impose logic on texts. That is, would translators ever accept a translation that was not intelligible to themselves? Translations of the Prajnaparamita texts do show that translators can accept contradictions in texts. But as discussed below, these paradoxes can be rendered into noncontradictory forms without torturing the texts.
20. The use of metaphors can introduce paradoxical-sounding remarks. When Eckhart says “the eye with which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me” (Eckhart 2009: 298), he is not referring to the physical eye but to the function of the mind that knows God—the nous—which is one with God (McGinn 2001: 151). That is, in knowledge by participation, Eckhart is claiming that God also knows us.
21. The apparent paradox that begins the Daodejing—“The Dao that can be communicated is not the eternal Dao” (chang dao)—can be resolved: the real Dao transcends language, and so any spoken Dao is a conceptualized object and thus not the eternal Dao. The text also suggests there are two daos: the eternal Dao and different daos that can be followed. Most of the world operates in keeping with its various daos, but we human beings have our own dao and most of us are not in step with it. This dao participates in the eternal Dao.
22. There is one objection that cannot be answered since all we have is what mystics have written: simply because we can restate a paradox consistently does not mean that the mystics themselves were thinking that way—perhaps they were in fact thinking inconsistently. But if the claims can be stated consistently, we should be careful in concluding that mystics must be irrational. Nevertheless, the danger remains that I am imposing logical consistency onto the mystical utterances when they meant otherwise.
23. The context of some earlier ideas may be lost today. Some reasoning in the nonmystical Hindu Brahmanas and Aranyaka texts from the first and early second millennia BCE seems truly bizarre—e.g., certain hymns have four verses and cattle are four-footed, and so recitation of the verses has the magical power to win cattle. Perhaps if we knew more of the culture it would not seem out-and-out irrational. But not necessarily: some claims may simply be irrational.
24. If transcendent realities were merely infinitely large phenomenal objects, the mathematics of infinities might be relevant, but mystics do not treat transcendent realities as merely large phenomenal ones. Rather, they are ontologically “wholly other” than anything phenomenal. Thus, thinking that “the introduction of the Absolute plays havoc with the rules of logic,” as Edward Conze said (1953: 127), or trying to use the “logic of infinity” to explain why there are paradoxes (e.g., how a transcendent reality can be both omnipresent and nowhere in the world), will not be appropriate from a mystical point of view: we would still be thinking in terms of large phenomenal realities. Nicholas of Cusa’s doctrine of the “coincidence of opposites” for overcoming contradictions in the attributes of God appears to be the product of his thinking about the “maximum” in almost mathematical terms.
25. One can say logic is state-specific in that it can only operate in states of consciousness with differentiated content. It could not operate in a state of consciousness in which there is no differentiated content, and the problem of paradoxes would arise only in dualistic states where one tries to conceptualize events. While accepting that logic applies only to statements, Walter Stace believed that only statements about two or more items can be logical or illogical, not statements about undifferentiated unity or what is ontologically one, as in mysticism (1960a: 270–74). But he could maintain his position only if he believed that logic really applied to the subject of statements rather than to the statements about that subject, or if he adopted the mirror theory of language (which amounts to the same thing). Statements occur in dualistic consciousness, but statements about unity are subject to logic.
26. However, not all cases of x and not-x in Nagarjuna’s works are exhaustive. In some instances, x and not-x are interconnected and not exhaustive—in particular, bhava and abhava. The absence of a bhava (an abhava) results from a bhava, and something can neither be a bhava or an abhava—e.g., nirvana (Ratnavali 42). Thus, denying the existence of a bhava in no way logically requires affirming an abhava—something can be neither. So too, the contrast between “existence” (sat) and “nonexistence” (asat) as he defines the terms is not exhaustive but only shows extremes: existence is eternal existence (and hence unceasing), and nonexistence is total nonexistence (and hence unarisen)—thus, something that comes into existence or did exist but comes to an end does not fall into either category. In fact, he argues that everything falls in between these extremes: because we see things arise, “nonexistence” is eliminated, and because we see things cease, “existence” is eliminated. Thus, he wants to establish a third category between eternal existence and total nonexistence—what is “empty” (shunya) of self-existence—by default since there is no other alternative. We may not agree that “exists” means “existing permanently by self-existence,” but it is not absurd, and so this way of reasoning is rational.
27. Nagarjuna’s opponent may be speaking the first line and Nagarjuna replying with the second. The text can be interpreted either way, but the point is the same either way.
28. The paradoxes of the ancient Greek Zeno also show that we can conceptualize perfectly ordinary everyday events in ways that would make them seem impossible or paradoxical—e.g., that the rabbit could never catch the tortoise in their race or an arrow could not move. The question here is whether Nagarjuna saw the world in a paradoxical manner.
29. Let me repeat that: mystics do not have a “logic of their own,” but appear to be logical by ordinary Western standards. I repeat this because every citation or quotation of my article on mysticism and rationality (1993: 59–78) that I have seen suggests that I was advocating that “mystics have their own logic”—something I was expressly denying.
30. Altered states of consciousness are not necessarily confused and disorienting. A study of near-death experiences showed that the thinking of a significant number of experiencers during those experiences seemed clearer, quicker, more logical, and more under control than usual (Kelly, Greyson, & Kelly 2007: 386).
1. Some may argue (following Sidney Hook) that science is a way of knowing the world since it gains new information, but that mysticism is merely a way of experiencing the world since it results in no new testable “knowledge-that” claims as science does. But the awareness of another aspect of reality (the beingness of things) than the one studied in science is a type of cognition—a “knowledge by participation”—even if mystical knowledge-claims are not scientifically testable.
2. As mentioned in chapter 4, advocates of mystical knowledge can claim that experiencing the transcendent is not a minimiracle initiated by a transcendent reality, but instead the mystic alone is active and is participating in a reality that is already always present in the mystic as the ground of the self or of the universe. The mind alone is active as in sense-experience and self-awareness; the transcendent source is not any more active in these experiences than in any other worldly event. No new energy or information is being injected into the world by a transcendent reality, and only natural processes of the brain are involved. This would affirm the existence of a transcendent reality and that it is open to experience, but it would not violate the causal closure of nature any more than does self-knowledge. Thus, there would be a purely natural basis for the transcendent knowledge.
3. Checking is a matter of the scientific community, and testing today is a team effort. This “social reasoning” weeds out biases and errors through criticism and argument. But mystical experiences have no empirical testing procedure, and the social community interpreting alleged mystical insights involves both mystics and nonmystics.
4. Scientists’ problems with studying consciousness were noted in chapter 4.
5. The sense of certainty that a mystic typically has contrasts mystical knowledge with scientific knowledge. In science, there is no certainty, but only the tentative acceptance of the best available theory among currently competing options. Any theory may be disproved. Of course, some scientists may be absolutely certain that the theory they back is correct (and this may be a motive to conduct further research), but the scientific community as a whole is more tentative about all but extremely well-supported theories.
6. The word “empirical” can lead to misunderstandings. Mystical is “empirical” in the sense of being experiential, but this does not mean that mystical claims are open to empirical checking by scientific methods or that mystical and scientific claims are of the same aspect of reality. Naturalists, like logical positivists, dismiss Advaita’s claim that “all is consciousness” precisely because there is no scientific way to test such a metaphysical claim. But even if we accept the claim as meaningful, there is still no way to test it empirically.
7. According to Thupten Jinpa, modern Tibetan scholars are divided on the issue of science (2003). One group views modern science as a rival to Buddhist philosophy. A second group views science as an ally and is eager to see science validate Buddhist principles. A third group regards science and Buddhism as equal partners and advocates a model of complementarity in which there is no attempt to reduce one to the other; rather, both science and Buddhism will expand the horizon of human knowledge and thus will give rise to a more comprehensive understanding both of human nature and of the world we inhabit. He places the Dalai Lama in the third group. But not everything that the Dalai Lama says in discussions with scientists supports the idea of a totally independent science (see Jones 2010: 169–73).
8. The karmic connection of action and consequence is a case of causation. In Buddhism, “dependent-arising” is a dependence relation rather than efficient causation: without condition x, y does not arise, and so we can end arising by removing the condition.
9. Where then does beingness come from? Some scientists argue in effect that scientific structures are the cause of being—not merely that a Higgs-like particle or field is responsible for some particles having matter, but that some structures explain why anything exists at all. Stephen Hawking believes he has shown how the universe spontaneously arises out of nothing, because the universe “can and will create itself from nothing” as a result of laws such as the law of gravity (Hawking & Mlodinow 2010: 180). However, he does not explain where those laws come from or why they have the power to create anything material and why they must create. At most, he has shown only that something cannot remain stable in an unmanifested neutral state—it must become manifest as positive and negative factors because of certain physical forces. But this does not explain why that something is already there rather than nothing that could become the universe: if the universe is the result of a quantum fluctuation, this still does not explain the presence of the medium that fluctuated. That is, there may be a zero sum between the positive energy of matter and the negative energy of gravity (and no energy is needed to create the manifest diversity we see), but where did that initial “stuff” come from whose symmetry cracked? This ultimate cosmological question remains, even if Hawking believes that philosophy is dead (ibid.: 5): beingness may be “nothing” from a scientific point of view since it is undifferentiated and structure-free and thus serves no scientific purpose, but it is not literally nothing—it is ontologically something. He still does not answer the ultimate cosmological question of why anything exists.
10. It should also be pointed out that the sciences in many traditional cultures such as India were seen as timeless and not as progressing as open-ended enterprises or in terms of knowledge of the world; rather, the sciences were presented in early texts as already established.
11. Karma is as much a structure of the world as the physical structures of electromagnetism or gravity, even though it involves our actions and their consequences rather than the interactions of inanimate objects. (However, in Buddhism the enlightened are said to be able to control the consequences of some karma, and also to have paranormal powers that could suspend other natural forces.)
12. On the possible historical role of mysticism in the development of science, see Jones 2010: chap. 4.
13. Note a contrast concerning time: in mysticism, only the present—the “eternal now” of present experience—matters, but in current science, “now” has all but dropped out of the picture. What matters in science is the causal order of “before” and “after”—the moment of now is absent from scientific equations and thus is irrelevant.
14. New Age advocates argue that Yogins perceive atoms. Rick Strassman also floats the theory that persons on the drug DMT experience beings in other dimensions of the natural universe, other worlds in the multiverse, and subatomic particles of dark matter (2001: 316–23). But mystics need not experience the underlying causes of everyday phenomena any more than we do when we experience solidity in the everyday world. There is no reason to postulate a new paranormal power to mystics when their experiences and claims can be explained otherwise.
15. Postmodernists rule out the possibility of any comparisons or commonality or collaboration between science and mysticism because they are different endeavors. But to the extent that mystics make claims about the nature of the same natural universe in their metaphysics that is also the subject of scientific study, conflict and agreement cannot be ruled out prior to an actual investigation. (For criticism of this “dogma of postmodernism,” see Wallace 2003: 20–25.)
16. In discussing my point about science and mysticism being “distinct and separate,” Ian Barbour criticized me for perhaps drawing “too sharp a line between science and religion” (2000: 86). To clarify: I am arguing that it is science and mysticism as ways of knowing that are distinct and separate—i.e., that the difference lies in what aspects of reality scientists and mystics focus on and how they approach them. But mystical traditions are total ways of life having metaphysics and religious ideas, and these may indeed not be completely separate from scientific theorizing.
17. One might try to see mysticism and science as complements in the scientific sense of the Copenhagen interpretation, but Ian Barbour shows the limitation of using complementarity from particle physics as a model for the relation of religion and science in general (2000: 76–78, 162–64).
18. Both scientists and mystics rely more on faith than is generally recognized. In mysticism, faith typically is in a tradition’s basic texts, doctrines, or other religious authorities. In Buddhism, it is faith (shradda) in the Buddha’s word. The Dalai Lama realizes that this separates Buddhism from science (2005: 28–29). In science, scientists do not start from scratch but rely on earlier findings and earlier theories. But in both endeavors those trained in the disciple can, in principle, check the earlier findings for themselves, although in the case of mysticism the confirmation would be limited to “verifying” the existence of the experiences and only the mystic tradition’s particular doctrinal interpretations.
1. That the early Buddhists defined action (karma) in terms of personal intention (chetana) points to the centrality of the inner life in mystical cultivation (Anguttara Nikaya 3.207, 3.415). This also occurs elsewhere, as with the Muslim Abu Hamid Mohammed al-Ghazali stressing the proper intention (niyya) as necessary to follow religious duties truly.
2. “Left-handed” Tantrikas reverse orthodox codes of conduct and utilize the personal desires that attach us to the cycle of rebirths. Indulging the desires is seen as a “quick path” to enlightenment, even though this may mean an immoral use of others for the Tantrika’s own end.
3. Even Shankara is said to have founded monasteries. But since the earliest references to these sites are only from hundreds of years after his time, he probably did not.
4. If the presuppositional problem concerning persons cannot be overcome, the Bhagavad-gita is an instance of a nonmoral other-worldly value-system. If compassion and humaneness do not figure as prominently in Daoism as suggested here, then Daoism is a case of a nonmoral this-worldly value-system.
5. Not everyone who takes drugs and is antinomian is a mystic. So too, merely being in an altered state of consciousness does not mean that a person can perform only good actions. The English word “assassin” comes from the Persian word for hashish: Muslim assassins ingested hashish before practicing their form of political action on Christian crusaders. The English word “berserk” comes from the Norse word for “berserkers,” who ingested psychoactive drugs before going on rampages. This suggests once again that certain values do not come from inner altered mental states but must be adopted into a way of life.
6. See Feuerstein (1991); Storr (1996); and Wilson (2000) for examples of narcissistic gurus who declared themselves to be “perfect masters” beyond good and evil. Arthur Deikman offers a simple “spiritual leader test”: how do they treat their spouse? Many would fail that test. So too, there does not appear to be a necessary correlation of moral character and yogic feats—paranormal meditative feats (such as lowering one’s heartbeat) in no way depend on the overall character of the practitioner.
7. An experiment that may have predisposed participants to be compassionate by including compassion-oriented meditation and by being led by a Tibetan monk, a member of a tradition emphasizing compassion, did show that mindfulness meditation increases compassionate responses to suffering and activity in the brain areas associated with empathy (Cordon et al. 2013; Mascaro et al. 2013). But no experiment yet suggests that meditation makes a noncompassionate person compassionate.
8. Elsewhere Danto (1976) spoke more broadly of “mysticism,” as if mysticism anywhere, not only in the Asian traditions he examines, must conflict with morality.
9. As Danto noted (1987: 17), the will and freedom of the will are not major issues in traditional Asian philosophy. The doctrine of karma is not deterministic but gives those within its sanction the free will to choose actions—otherwise, once one is under the power of karma, liberation from it would be impossible. If predestination in Western theism means our choices are predetermined, it is a far greater problem to free will than anything in the Asian traditions discussed here. So too, God’s omnipotence denies that any creature could have free will or control, since any such power would be contrary to God’s absolute power.
10. See Kripal (2002) for the interesting case of the Neo-Vedantin Vivekananda, who was influenced by modernity, secularism, and individualism, and who attempted to forge a modern, socially minded mysticism. Jeffrey Kripal contrasts Vivekananda here with his teacher, Ramakrishna, who adhered to a more traditional world-denying form of mystical Hinduism and attached little importance to reforming this world. And, as Kripal points out, Vivekananda returned to the more traditional mystical stance late in life.
11. Actually, the Sanskrit phrase “tat tvam asi” cannot be mean “you are that Brahman.” As Joel Brereton (1986) points out, the pronoun “sa,” not “tat” would be needed for that (although the Upanishads do occasionally use the neuter pronoun “tat” for masculine subjects). In the passage in question, a father is teaching his son that he exists in the same way as all life does. Thus, the phrase means something like “you exist in that way” or “you have the same essence [atman] as all living things.” Brahman is not mentioned in the passage. But for the sake of the discussion here, I will treat the phrase the way the thinkers I am discussing treat it: the self (atman) is identical to Brahman and is the only reality.
12. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Arthur Schopenhauer made similar claims. (Deussen’s reading of Indian mysticism influenced his friend Friedrich Nietzsche.) Meister Eckhart stated that one should love all persons equally, including oneself, since all are in God; it is imperfect to love any one person more; thus, “if you love yourself, you love all men as yourself” (2009: 296).
13. Thus, under the nonmoral option, a mystic can be “selfish” (as with Theravada Buddhism) or can selflessly work to maintain the world (as with this Advaita option). So too, a mystic may remain engaged with society or simply walk away.
14. The “is/ought” question is complicated by premises mixing both factual and evaluative claims. (See Jones 2004: 31–33.)
15. There may or may not be a universal core to all ethical codes (e.g., injunctions against incest and against some types of homicides), and people everywhere may or may not in the main share the same moral intuitions. But the issue here is why mystics follow any code—is it for other-regarding motives or purely for self-regarding cultivation? That some mystics intentionally defy their tradition’s code also raises a problem, although this does indirectly affirm the code as the norm for society as a whole.
16. Some philosophers (e.g., John Mackie and Richard Garner) argue for totally nonmystical reasons that morality is a delusion—i.e., there is no objective reality called “morality” or “right and wrong” or universal injunctions external to our desires.
17. The Hasidic movement of the eighteenth century appears to have arisen out of the antinomian Sabbatian movement, but it became orthodox over the course of time.
18. Also see King (1993) on the samurai and Zen. Japan also has a history of warring Zen monks. There is a frightening connection between religious fanaticism and violence (see Juergensmeyer 2000). One is reminded of the 9/11 terrorists chanting “God is great!” as they crashed the airplanes into the World Trade Center, and Christian Crusaders’ battle cry “God wills it!” (deus vult). As Alfred North Whitehead said, “religion is the last refuge of human savagery” (1926: 37). A Serbian bishop could actually use the principle of nonviolence and Christian love of one’s enemies to justify the extermination of Muslims as a sacred act. And the religious convictions resulting from mystical experiences may intensify such fanaticism.
19. Zen may have been an exception to the general moral concern of Mahayana Buddhism. Zen practices are not geared toward cultivating compassion or generosity. East Asian Confucian social ethics provided the framework that Zen Buddhists operated in and responded to. The famous ox-herding paintings, with the last showing the enlightened monk returning to the marketplace, need not mean that the monk now engages others in a moral way (although that is how it became traditionally interpreted), but only that he has returned to the social world.
20. As noted in chapter 6, the Daodejing emphasizes the interconnection of concepts such as “right” and “wrong.” But this does not necessarily mean that we must have “war” if we are to have “peace.” If we eliminated war, then the interconnected concepts of “war” and “peace” would no longer be applicable. The same is true for any negative phenomenon.
21. Less coldly, Plotinus said “The sage would like all men to prosper and no one to suffer evil, but if this does not happen, he is still happy” (Enneads 1.4.11).
22. The nonmystical Christian Ranters in seventeenth-century England gave a libertine spin to the logic of the doctrine of predestination: whether I am among the “elect” or the damned was determined before I was born, and nothing I can do in this life can alter my destiny; thus, none of my actions here matter, and so I might as well enjoy myself.
23. There is little in classical mysticism on reforming society or protesting social conditions even in societies that value community over individualism; rather, the only way truly to relieve human suffering is to change individuals inwardly. But morality is not tied to individualism, and some modern mystics (such as Gandhi) have become more socially minded as the possibility of changing social structures to improve worldly conditions for all within a society has become more plausible.
24. This is not to deny that prophets who are sensitive to suffering and social injustice may have mystical experiences and that mystical selflessness may enhance their prophetic mission. But prophets undertake a way of life that is not centered around mystical cultivation, and thus their way of life is not mystical. One can be prophetic without a mystical experience, and one can be a mystic without being prophetic.
1. Such experiences may have long-term beneficial psychological and physiological effects (but see Ospina 2007; Chen 2012; Sedlmeier et al. 2012), such as enhancing our sense of “well-being,” i.e., a sense of satisfaction with life or a purpose or meaning to life. But it is interesting to note that without a religious interpretative framework, some mystical experiences may not have positive effects but lead instead to less well-being (see Byrd, Lear, & Schwenka 2000). Thus, it may be that naturalists would have to work out a framework in which mystical experiences are treated positively as cognitive of natural realities if mystical experiences are not to have a negative effect on their sense of well-being.
2. Science is usually blamed for the loss of interest in all transcendent realties, but the picture is complicated. In fact, religion itself must take much of the blame (see Jones 2012a: 237–43). So too, surveys that suggest that mystical and other spiritual experiences remain common in the United States and the United Kingdom today provide at least some evidence that the dominance of modern science has not wiped out such experiences.
3. A generation ago, Agehananda Bharati noted that few monks in Thailand under fifty meditated (1976: 233). Thailand, often considered the world’s most Buddhist country, exhibits the problem of modernity as its prosperity grows: there is less religious activity today and over a 50 percent drop in the number of monks. There are also sex and money scandals among the monks. And now there is violence by the Buddhist majority against Muslims. But regardless, followers still make offerings to the monks to earn their own karmic merit.
4. Rahner also believed that mystics are the paradigms of being truly human. The rest of us are falling short by blocking the mystical potential latent in each of us.
5. The pull of this question has recently converted the atheist philosophers Anthony Flew and Paul Feyerabend to believe that there must be some reason for the natural world—not that they have become theists or believe in life after death. Flew adopted a type of deism, while Feyerabend remained more agnostic.
6. One common generalization is that the “modern mind” informed by science forms worldviews in a different way than does the “traditional mind” informed by mysticism and mythology. The former starts with the natural world as given and looks for what knowledge we can attain through experience and reason. The latter starts with the primacy of transcendent realities as given; it sees the natural world as a product of supreme transcendent realities, and sees human beings as participating directly in transcendent realities. Through the latter approach, societies come up with competing comprehensive metaphysical views. Through the modern approach, we need not end up with a metaphysical system that denies all transcendent realities (i.e., naturalism), but our starting point remains different.
7. Advocates of mysticism as a force for changing religion or society today may reply that these surveys typically do not differentiate mystical experiences from other types of spiritual experiences, and so we do not know how many of the experiences accounted for are truly mystical. So too, there is the problem that participants may not be applying the same terminology uniformly. But even with New Age spirituality, it is hard to maintain that there must be dramatically more mystical experiences in toto today than in the past.
8. As discussed earlier, some doctrines will always be necessary in mysticism for the mystics themselves to understand the realities they have experienced. But if the focus becomes the doctrines themselves, attention will be directed away from what is experienced, and the result may be that the doctrines will become about something other than what was experienced. For example, in theism God becomes an object of reasoning—the paradigm being the Ontological Argument—rather than a reality encountered. Even if theologians argue that they are actually only trying to establish by reason the existence and properties of what is experienced, nevertheless the god they argue about is made into something objective. Thus, theology divorced from spirituality is likely to begin talking about a god that is radically different in nature from a reality encountered in an introvertive mystical experience. In this way, theology can suck the life out of mysticism and impede mystical experiences. So too, mysticism may have influenced religious doctrines in the past, but whether it can inject a new influence in theology today is open to question since the input from mystical experiences themselves would remain the same as in the past.
9. Any “universal mysticism,” such as perennial philosophy, is not likely to become “the tangible religion of the future for more than a few pure spirits” (Ellwood 1999: 159). That religions in general are not coming together to form one unified tradition should also be pointed out. Nor is a common theology or religious theory developing among religions. Instead, the number of subtraditions is multiplying. As Robert Ellwood notes, the actual dynamics of religious history strongly militate against a syncretism made up of any sort of combination of the present world religions taking over (ibid.: 159).