Mystical Experience and Metaphysics

Mystical Experience and Metaphysics

Paul Marshall

When significant parallels are observed between the metaphysical teachings of mystical traditions, there can be a temptation to attribute them to common experiential insights, as mystical perenni-alists do, and it is indeed possible that some shared features of metaphysical systems do have a basis in common experience. For example, the language of light that is a common feature of emanative metaphysics, expressive of the outflow of creation from its source and of mystical return to that source, is probably more than symbol-ism based on universal familiarity with the life-giving sun, for special experiences of luminosity are a very common, cross-cultural feature of mystical experience. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to overlook other possibilities, such as the emer-gence of comparable ideas in different cultures through discursive reflection alone or through the diffusion of ideas by missionary activity, trade, military expeditions, and migration. Significant transmission of mystical ideas has certainly taken place on occasions, as for instance in the well-recognized influence of Neoplatonism on forms of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism.

Reality has distinguishable “aspects” – facets, subdomains, dimensions, gradations, levels – with which mystics come into contact. William James (1902) adopted an aspectist position when, in the face of the metaphysical diversity of mystical teach-ings, he raised the possibility that mystical states are “windows” on “a more extensive and inclusive world,” and pointed out that this world may have a “mixed constitu-tion,” with heights and depths (p. 428). The classic Indian parable of the elephant and the blind men, told in Jaina, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions, can be used to bring across the approach. The blind men, unable to see the elephant and therefore its varied totality, touch different parts of the animal, such as the tail, trunk, leg, and ear, and so have different experiences and give different accounts of the elephant, likening it to a rope, snake, pillar, and rug respectively. The aspectist supposes that mystics of all traditions “touch” reality, make contact with it, but may have different experiences of it, depending on which facets of reality they discover. Some mystics will make contact with a personal creative aspect, some with an impersonal aspect, some with cosmic reality, some with an archetypal realm, and so forth. Mystical traditions with complex ontologies have room for understanding a variety of expe-riences, and if the ontologies are constructed hierarchically, as they often have been, then the corresponding types of mystical experiences will be ordered hierarchically too, and taken to reflect stages of mystical development. Although the deepest level of reality may be simple, reality as a whole is stratified and complex.

The essay itself is a supplement for Marshall's essay in Beyond Physicalism entitled, "Mystical experiences as windows on reality" - posted excerpts from the essay a few times in this thread.

What Does Mysticism Have To Teach Us About Consciousness

In this article I would like to bring the findings of my somewhat unusual but increas-ingly accepted field — mysticism — to the discussion, for I think they may offer some helpful insights about consciousness. Why? When a biologist seeks to understand a complex phenomenon, one key strategy is to look to at it in its simplest form. Probably the most famous is the humble bacterium E. coli. Its simple gene structure has allowed us to understand much of the gene functioning of complex species. Similarly many bio-logists have turned to the “memory” of the simple sea slug to understand our own more kaleidoscopic memory. Freud and Durkheim both used totemism, which they construed as the simplest form of religion, to understand the complexities of religious life.1 The methodological principle is: to understand something complex turn to its simple forms. Mystical experiences may represent just such a simple form of human consciousness. Usually our minds are an enormously complex stew of thoughts, feelings, sensations, wants, snatches of song, pains, drives, daydreams and, of course, consciousness itself more or less aware of it all. To understand consciousness in itself, the obvious thing would be to clear away as much of this internal detritus and noise as possible. It turns out that mystics seem to be doing precisely that. The technique that most mystics use is some form of meditation or contemplation. These are procedures that, often by recycling a mental subroutine,2 systematically reduce mental activity. During meditation, one begins to slow down the thinking process, and have fewer or less intense thoughts.

One’s thoughts become as if more distant, vague, or less preoccupying; one stops paying as much attention to bodily sensations; one has fewer or less intense fantasies and day-dreams. Thus by reducing the intensity or compelling quality of outward perception and inward thoughts, one may come to a time of greater stillness. Ultimately one may become utterly silent inside, as though in a gap between thoughts, where one becomes completely perception- and thought-free. One neither thinks nor perceives any mental or sensory content. Yet, despite this suspension of content, one emerges from such events confident that one had remained awake inside, fully conscious. This experience, which has been called the pure consciousness event, or PCE, has been identified in vir-tually every tradition. Though PCEs typically happen to any single individual only occa-sionally, they are quite regular for some practitioners.3 The pure consciousness event may be defined as a wakeful but contentless (non-intentional) consciousness...