The greatest blessings come to us through madness, when it is sent as a gift of the gods. Heaven-sent madness is superior to man-made sanity.
—Plato
There are forces pulling and pushing against the study of mysticism today. On the one hand, the rise of spirituality has drawn attention to mysticism, and empirical research has suggested that mystical experiences may be much more common than is generally accepted (Hardy 1983; Hood 2006). Mystical experiences that occur either through cultivation or spontaneously are often considered by the experiencers as the defining moments of their lives. There also has been a recent surge of scientific interest in meditators and in the neural and pharmacological bases and causes of mystical experiences. On the other hand, there have been recent sex and money scandals involving “enlightened” Zen and Hindu teachers, and there is the general academic suspicion that mysticism is only a matter of subjectivity, deliberate obscurantism, and irrationality.
In Anglo-American philosophy, mysticism has remained a constant if minor topic within philosophy of religion. Not all questions in philosophy of mysticism are pertinent to more general philosophy, but many are important to philosophy of religion and to philosophy more generally. What is unique about mysticism is the purported contribution of exotic experiences to mystical claims. Are these experiences “objective” in the sense of revealing something about reality outside of the “subjective” individual mind? Do mystical experiences reveal truths about the universe that are not obtainable through science or reasoning about what other experiences reveal to us? Do they reinforce scientific truths? Or do they conflict with scientific truths? Or are they noncognitive and only a matter of emotion? How is it possible to claim that a fundamental reality is experienced when there is allegedly no experiencing subject or object experienced? Why do mystics have trouble expressing what is allegedly experienced in these experiences and not in ordinary cognitive experiences? Are mystics blatantly irrational, speaking what turns out to be only gibberish? Is morality ultimately grounded in mystical experiences, or are mystics necessarily selfish and thus not moral at all? With such questions as these, mysticism introduces issues not found in considering nonmystical experiences and general religious ways of life by themselves.
A current comprehensive treatment of the basic problems in this field is long overdue. No major comprehensive book on philosophy of mysticism has been published since Walter Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy in 1960. The closest is the important collection of essays published by William Wainwright in 1981. Since then, a number of developments and new issues have arisen—in particular, those raised by postmodernism and scientific research.
One new issue is the postmodern questioning of the very term “mysticism” as a useful or even valid category. The term is not common to all cultures but was invented only in the modern era in the West. This has led postmodernists to question whether the term can be used to classify phenomena from any other culture or era. (Wilfred Cantwell Smith spent a generation trying to banish the term “religion” from academic discourse on similar grounds. And a generation before that, Gilbert Ryle asserted the same of “science”: “There is no such animal as ‘Science’ ”—i.e., there is no “science” in the abstract but only “scores of sciences” [1954: 71].) However, although the terms “mysticism” and “mystics” are relatively new Western inventions, it does not follow that no phenomena that existed earlier in the West or in other cultures can be labeled “mystical.” All claims are made from particular perspectives that are set up by culturally-dependent ideas and conceptualizations, but this does not mean that they cannot capture something significant about reality, any more than the fact that scientific claims are made from points of views dictated by particular scientific interests and specific theories means that scientific claims must be groundless. This is true for any term: the invention of a concept does not invent the phenomena in the world that the concept covers. The natural historian Richard Owen invented the term “dinosaur” in the 1830s to classify certain fossils he was studying. However, to make the startling claim “Dinosaurs did not exist before 1830” would at best only be a confusing way of stating the obvious fact that classifying fossils with this concept was not possible before the concept was devised if dinosaurs existed, they existed much earlier, and their existence did not depend on our concepts in any fashion. (Claiming “Dinosaurs did not exist before 1830” may sound silly, but a postmodernist has made the claim that scientists invented quarks. And postmodernists do regularly claim that there was no religion or Buddhism or Hinduism before modern times.)
The same applies to our concepts about human phenomena such as mysticism. Even if there are no equivalents of “mysticism,” “mystics,” or “mystical experiences” in Sanskrit, Chinese, or any other language, this does not rule out that scholars may find phenomena in other cultures to which the terms apply and reveal something important about them. Nor does using a Western term mean that we need not try to understand phenomena from other cultures in their own terms: classifying something from India or China as “mystical” in the modern sense does not make it Western or modern any more than classifying Sanskrit or Chinese as a “language”—another term of Western origin with its own history—makes them into Western phenomena or mashes all languages into one. A few scholars deny that there is any “languages” in reality (e.g., Noam Chomsky and Donald Davidson), but few advocate expunging the word “language” from English or deny that the cross-cultural study of languages may reveal something of the nature of all languages. In sum, introducing the modern comparative category of “mysticism” does not change the character of the phenomena of a particular culture; it only focuses attention on certain aspects of cultural phenomena, and this may lead to insights about them.
A second line of postmodern attack is that the use of the term “mysticism” suggests some unchanging “essence” to all mystical phenomena when there is none. As discussed in chapters 1 and 2, there is no generic “mysticism” but only specific mystics, traditions, and experiences. Nevertheless, we can use a term to classify certain phenomena without assuming some unchanging essence to those phenomena. Indeed, by the same reasoning, no classificatory terms of any kind could ever be used: there are, for example, no “dogs” but only German shepherds, various breeds of terriers, and so forth and these categories in turn break down with cross-breeding. Using the word “dog” does not mean that such animals (to use another classificatory term) have not been constantly evolving throughout history or have an “essence”—it only means it is a convenient way to classify some current animals. A term can indicate defining characteristics, and the phenomena can still be constantly changing. The borders of what is and is not a “dog” may or may not be clear, and the same applies to any classificatory term: there may not be hard and fast boundaries between “mystical experiences” and other types of experiences or between “mysticism” and other cultural phenomena. Such terms in fact may only work in terms of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called “family resemblances,” but this does not mean that they are not useful for classifying some phenomena or that the classification may not reveal something significant about the nature of such phenomena. (So too, claiming that concepts from different cultures fall into the general category of “transcendent realities” does not mean that they all mean the same thing or that they all are referring to one reality.)
A third area of concern is the very attempt at any philosophical assessment of the truth-value of mystical claims to knowledge. Postmodernists deny that there are any cross-cultural standards for accepting or refuting the claims made in any “way of life”—there can be no judgments of truth or falsity from outside a way of life. The justification and rationality of beliefs are also internal to each way of life. Problems with the postmodernists’ position on truth will be pointed out in chapters 3 and 7. A fourth postmodern claim—that there are no genuine mystical experiences or, if there are, they do not add any knowledge—will be discussed in chapter 2.
Today the focus of the study of mysticism is typically on phenomena connected to unique “mystical experiences.” (The modern sense of “mysticism” and its study will be clarified in the first two chapters.) Any focus on individuals’ experiences is out of step with postmodernism’s focus on cultures as a whole, on texts, and on issues of social and political power. To postmodernists, the focus on experiences reflects only modern concerns about the self and the loss of traditional sources of authority. Nevertheless, science suggests that what postmodernists disparage as the “experientialist approach” is a legitimate subject: experiencers and their brain states during mystical experiences are subjects of neuroscientific study today, and there is neurological evidence suggesting distinctive mystical experiences. If so, mystical experiences should also be a legitimate topic for phenomenology and philosophical reflection. In addition, philosophical reflection on whether such experiences are veridical and on what role they may play in the development and defense of doctrines cannot be dismissed simply because it arose only in the modern era—again, merely because the questions are new does not make them illegitimate or unanswerable when looking at modern and premodern cultural phenomena.
But studying mysticism involves more than just the study of mystical experiences. For this, we have to rely on texts from different eras and cultures from around the world. Some scholars reject the need for any empathetic approach in favor of focusing exclusively on what can be observed and measured and thus what mystics actually say can be ignored. But philosophers are interested in what mystics claim about knowledge and values. One problem is unique to studying mysticism: the role of allegedly “empty” yet cognitive experiences. Do we need to have mystical experiences to study mysticism? Can nonmystics meaningfully study mysticism? There is the basic problem of studying claims based on experiences that many scholars have not had. But if we can understand mystics’ claims without having had a mystical experience of any kind, then such an experience is not a necessary prerequisite to studying mysticism. Nonmystics would be in the position of a blind physicist studying light, but if they can understand mystical claims then the study of mysticism by nonmystics would not be ruled out.
So can nonmystics understand mystics’ claims? The question of the truth or falsity of such claims would be bracketed at this initial stage. All any philosopher can do is focus on the mystics’ writings and public actions. Getting into another person’s mind may be impossible, but understanding what is said in texts does not require this: meaning is objective in the sense that it is independent of the authors’ inner life but expressed in public terms that others can understand and thus is open to scrutiny by others. That is, we can get at the meaning of claims even if we cannot now see the full significance of these claims to the practitioners. Nor is it obvious that it is necessary to belong to a given mystic’s tradition to understand his or her claims. That is, outsiders can view mystical claims in terms of the meaning that a mystic gives a text if we have a sufficient amount of his or her writings and other texts from that culture and era, and thus an outsider’s understanding is possible to the extent that such meaning is objective. That there were debates in India between rival schools does not prove that they understood each other’s claims without being a member of that tradition since there is a very real possibility that the debaters created straw figures and simply talked past each other without engaging each other’s genuine positions. But less than a conversion is needed to understand—indeed, we would have to have some understanding of the claims before any conversion could occur in order to appreciate what we would be converting to. We cannot assume that because we come from another culture that no such understanding is possible—i.e., that we cannot suspend our understanding of the world enough that through study we could come to understand another point of view. Thus, some initial understanding does seem possible (although this issue will return in chapters 3 and 6). Any role of mystical experiences in developing mystical doctrines does not rule this out. The alternative is that the entire study of history is impossible—e.g., no one today could understand a Southern slave owner’s point of view in the American Civil War, and so there is no point in studying the Civil War. The presence of exotic experiences may increase the difficulty in understanding mystical claims, but it does not rule out the possibility of such understanding.
A related issue is that, even if a mystical experience is not required to understand mystics’ claims, must scholars at least be mystically minded to understand them? Or is there a low threshold for understanding mystical claims? Can scholars be “mystically unmusical,” as Max Weber claimed to be concerning religion, and still understand mystical claims? One does get the sense from reading many philosophers on mysticism that they have no feel for the subject at all and that their only knowledge of the subject comes from reading other philosophers on mysticism—the closest they have approached a mystical text is reading the snippets in William James’s The Variety of Religious Experiences. Nothing suggests in most philosophical works that the author had had any mystical experiences or had practiced in a mystical tradition. Such a limited background would be unacceptable in any other field of philosophy. Anyone whose knowledge of science came only from reading other philosophers of science would not have much of value to contribute in that field. At best, all they could do is point out errors in philosophers’ reasoning that anyone ignorant of science could do, but they could not advance our understanding of science in any way. Only one who has practiced a scientific discipline or extensively studied primary sources would be qualified to add to the field. And the same should apply in philosophy of mysticism. Having a mystical experience would no doubt help in understanding mystics’ claims on one level. But note that even mystics themselves must describe their experiences and make doctrinal claims only outside introvertive experiences in “dualistic” states of consciousness. They are then separated in time from the experiences and see them from a distance. So too, mystics themselves can assess whether their experiences are genuine and determine the role their own mystical experiences play in justifying their claims only outside introvertive mystical experiences.
As discussed in chapter 3, being a mystic does not necessarily qualify one to see the various issues involved in making claims to knowledge. In fact, any strong emotional impact that mystics feel from these experiences may make it harder for them to examine their own experiences and claims critically and to avoid an unwarranted sense of certainty in their own particular interpretation of their experiences. Thus, a philosophical examination is especially important in this field. The fundamental role that a religious commitment plays in one’s life may also adversely affect one’s objectivity in assessing the truth of mystical claims and the causes of mystical experiences. Would that interfere with understanding claims from an alien religion or era? If the religiously committed cannot be objective, does this not also mean that committed nonreligious naturalists also cannot be objective? Must one favor one’s own tradition and disparage others? However, it does seem possible to be both empathetic in order initially to understand mystics’ claims from other cultures and eras, and also open-minded enough to judge the possible truth or falsity of the claims subsequently, regardless of one’s personal broader commitments. That is sufficient here. To test the results, all one can do is present one’s claims and see how others within and outside various traditions judge them.
Philosophers are asking questions that mystics themselves may not have asked, but this does not invalidate those questions or make it impossible to infer answers. However, one must be cautious regarding any answer advanced. No one can help but approach any subject from one’s own contemporary cultural background. Today one basic problem for anyone who has been influenced by modern science is that we see the world through the lens of modern science. This can lead to distorting mysticism, as has happened with many New Age advocates (see Jones 2010, forthcoming). Moreover, a strong argument can be made that since the advent of modern science we can never see the world the way that premodern people did. We simply are not capable of experiencing the “sacred world” of the medieval Christians, let alone experiencing the world as early Buddhists, Hindus, or Daoists experienced it. The modern emphasis on the subjective in religion and on individualism in general also may affect our ability to enter into another person’s world of meaning. But we still may be able to understand what others are saying without experiencing the world as they do. Nevertheless, in the end, the best one can do is to make clear what questions one is asking and to try to support the answers. This bears on the problem of translations of mystical texts from premodern and non-Western cultures. Philosophers see problems in any translation over the alleged incommensurability of concepts. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz quipped in response that translating, like riding a bike, is something that is easier to do that say. I am familiar with the problems in trying to translate classical Buddhist and Hindu Sanskrit texts into English. A translator can never be certain that he or she is conveying what the authors truly meant. The possibility of mystical experiences informing these texts intensifies the issue. But this problem does not appear insurmountable if one looks at a large segment of a given mystic’s work in the context of his or her tradition and culture. Simply reading brief snippets or isolated statements in translation cannot be the sum of one’s research since one’s general theory of mysticism would then control one’s understanding rather than letting the data build understanding. The possibility that we may inadvertently make other people into mirror images of ourselves cannot be ignored, but this does not mean that in principle we cannot understand others’ claims or that we must unconsciously always see claims in our own terms. People today can in principle grasp the basic outlook of premoderns through study. We can see what they are saying in their own terms without accepting their claims. That classical mystics typically believe that their own tradition is epistemically superior may make them feel exempt from being placed in the same boat with mystics from other traditions. But we can understand a claim and reject it, arguing instead that, based on the comparison of the epistemic position of different mystical traditions, no tradition begins in a privileged position. That will be the approach adopted here: all mystics will be treated as being in the same epistemic position until shown otherwise for other than theological reasons.
Mysticism will be examined here philosophically. This is not to say that other approaches are not valid or useful. No mystical phenomenon is exclusively mystical or of only one “nature”: like all human phenomena, mystical phenomena have cultural, social, psychological, and physiological components. Thus, mysticism can be legitimately approached from different perspectives in the social sciences, history, humanities, and neuroscience, with different aspects of mysticism appearing through each. No one approach is exhaustive. Each is limited by the type of questions asked and by what counts as an answer, but each can reveal aspects of mysticism that other perspectives must omit by the limitations of their questions. The different approaches need not conflict: since different disciplines deal with different aspects of mystical phenomena and reflect different interests, one discipline need not in principle deny what is revealed in other disciplines—only if a discipline claims to be the only explanation needed must there be conflicts. All that is claimed here is that approaching mysticism by asking philosophical questions can reveal something valuable of mystics’ experiences, knowledge-claims, and values.
The analytical philosophical approach focuses on one particular abstraction from total mystical ways of life: the skeleton of beliefs and values—i.e., the knowledge-claims made by mystics about the nature of reality, human beings, and so on, and the value-claims about what is valuable or significant, ethics, and the goals of the ways of life, and their justifications. Analytical philosophers look at the truth, rationality, and coherence of such claims. If mysticism were merely a matter of emotion, mystics’ claims would not be of great interest to most philosophers. But mystics claim to have experienced some fundamental reality in a way that is not open to normal experiences. Philosophers look at how mystics use language, and they also examine how religious claims work and are justified in order to examine what role mystical experiences may play in the development and defense of the doctrines and values of a mystical tradition. They also look to see whether there is any scientific evidence for such experiences. This leads to making an evaluation of the truth or usefulness of mystical claims. This is not to deny the fullness of mystical ways of life or to claim that knowledge-claims and value-claims are the central feature in the lives of mystics: doctrines may not figure prominently in how one leads one’s day-to-day life. Nor are mystics out to test a hypothesis or to prove the existence of God, but rather to lead a particular way of life. Indeed, like most people, mystics may pay very little attention to their doctrinal knowledge-claims. Nor does what appears through a philosophical perspective make the intellectual core the “essence” of a mystical way of life or its most important aspect for all pictures of mysticism. But this abstraction is central to our understanding and appreciating any way of life. (As will be noted in chapter 2 postmodernists today downplay any role for knowledge-claims in mysticism.) Philosophical analysis can also help mystics themselves in understanding their own commitments, and by clarifying issues it may indirectly help create new mystical doctrines.
Thus, both explicit claims and implicit claims entailed by practices and by the explicit claims are central to the philosophical abstraction of mysticism. However, although knowledge- and value-claims can be abstracted from mystical texts, this does not mean that the aim of mystics is to advance disinterested beliefs about the nature of the world or ethics. Nor can all the different uses mystics make of language in prayers, instruction, and so on be reduced to just making assertions. Nor does focusing on doctrines disparage the rest of a mystical way of life. In fact, we cannot understand mystical claims outside their setting within a way of life: we need to look at different aspects of a mystic’s full way of life to understand the intellectual skeleton—just as the human skeleton can be understood only in the context of the full body and its activities, so too the philosophical skeleton can only be understood in the context of the full, lived way of life. So too, mystical action-guides must be understood in their context of a mystical goal and beliefs about what is real (see Jones 2004). Focusing on the intellectual content without considering the lived way of life would be like focusing on musical notes on a sheet of music and forgetting the music. But it is the task of historians in religious studies studying the human phenomena connected to religion to show us the beliefs and values that are integral to each particular mystic’s way of life, and philosophers must rely on their findings to understand those beliefs and values and mystics’ arguments.
Philosophers ask questions that mystics may find irrelevant to how they lead their lives. For example, the problem of competing knowledge-claims may be irrelevant to mystics, who typically are convinced of the truth of their own tradition’s claims. Nevertheless, the philosophical approach leads to basic questions. Do mystics in fact have unique experiences? How do their experiences relate to their claims? Are these experiences cognitive? That is, do mystics gain insights into the nature of reality, or are mystics delusional in some way? Does the scientific study of meditation invalidate mystical claims or in fact validate them? Do the experiences justify belief in transcendent realities? Is only one particular view of alleged transcendent realities justified? Can mystics express what they experience? Are mystics irrational in their discourse and arguments? Do their experiences have any necessary consequences for values and morality? Thus, all the major areas of philosophy are involved: identifying the phenomenon being studied (chapters 1 and 2), knowledge (chapters 3 and 4), metaphysics (chapter 5), language (chapter 6), rationality (chapter 7), the relation to science (chapter 8), and ethics (chapter 9). Clarifying such matters through analysis can also help historians and scientists who work on the empirical side of the study of mysticism.