What makes an experience “mystical?"

What makes an experience “mystical?"

Paul Marshall

What reality is mystical experience felt to disclose? In some cases, it’s the everyday world of objects, plants, animals, and people, even the universe as a whole, now known in greater depth and clarity and as inseparable from oneself. Or the reality might be some other world, say a spiritual realm considered to be distinct from our universe, or it might be a reality understood as truly ultimate, whether a personal God, ineffable absolute, or fundamental consciousness.

One possible explanation as to why experiences can be so similar in very different circumstances is that they do give access to an objective reality, one that is the same for everyone. Love, unity, light, knowing recur across experiences because they are intrinsic to the deeper nature of reality. Alternatively, it might be conjectured that the very different circumstances have the same effect on brain functioning and therefore result in the same kind of experience. Even if that were the case, it doesn’t follow that the brain manufactures those experiences. It may just be that the altered brain functioning facilitates or permits the experiences by allowing access to normally hidden depths of reality.

You ask how a non-physical entity can have a shape. The religious and mystical literature is replete with visions of spiritual beings with size and shape. I would question the assumption that spiritual or mental things invariably lack physical properties such as extension. In modern times, this assumption is inherited from the Cartesian dualism of unextended mind and extended matter, and look how problematic that turned out to be. 

You ask how a non-physical entity can have a shape. The religious and mystical literature is replete with visions of spiritual beings with size and shape. I would question the assumption that spiritual or mental things invariably lack physical properties such as extension. In modern times, this assumption is inherited from the Cartesian dualism of unextended mind and extended matter, and look how problematic that turned out to be. 

Extension no longer makes sense as purely a physical property. Especially considering that it makes more sense for physicality to be considered as just a subset of mental or spiritual phenomena, albeit shaped by the senses which are also provided by the physical avatar we incarnate into and perceive through.

Any phenomena that can become a field, of whatever nature, has extension, whether in physical space, astral space, mental space.

In a mystical experience... as you've noted in other threads, perhaps the experience is of the Cosmically Immense Soul ~ every Cosmically Immense Soul sharing the same core nature, despite every CIS being a distinct individual energetically.

So... a mystical experience would therefore imply that every single incarnate individual is a divine being in their true nature, a "god", if you will.

(Of course, you get some individuals who then ask why incarnate into pain and suffering if we're so perfect and powerful and infinite? Why do we need to learn or grow or anything?)

So... a mystical experience would therefore imply that every single incarnate individual is a divine being in their true nature, a "god", if you will.

This is what it seems like to me.

I think extension + relation to fields helps explain what is being filtered and how it could possibly be filtered, as per Marshall's paper The Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness: The Reducing Valve Theory:

Bergson took such a route. His filter theory, set out in Matière et Mémoire (1896), addressed normal perception and memory, drawing on the evidence of speech and memory pathologies, although he later applied it to telepathy and near-death life reviews. The metaphysical backdrop to his theory can be considered ‘neutral monist’, the basic elements of the universe being regarded as neutral with respect to mind and matter. Like the rest of the universe, the brain and body are made up of neutral ‘images’, and so perception operates through the selection of one set of images by another set that makes up brain and body (Barnard, 2011).

Where I think Marshall goes astray elsewhere in that paper is assuming that somehow Mind at Large is split (yet not) from One to Many.

I prefer a "Priority Monism" where the "priority" is the fundamental nature of the Many, perhaps grounded in One (possibly God, Tao, Brahman, Source, etc) but not fated to just sink back into that Absolute.

[Laird]

I prefer a "Priority Monism" where the "priority" is the fundamental nature of the Many

A note (a little pedantically given that we've discussed it elsewhere): I think that this gets the prioritisation on priority monism backwards; the priority is on the monism, not the plurality.

A note (a little pedantically given that we've discussed it elsewhere): I think that this gets the prioritisation on priority monism backwards; the priority is on the monism, not the plurality.

Yeah I might have to call it Schelling-Platonic Monism or somesuch...though maybe it should just be called a Pluralism with Absolute Ground...

[Laird]

Yeah I might have to call it Schelling-Platonic Monism or somesuch...

Hmm. I think you're alluding to our previous discussion. Again, I didn't see Naomi as using "priority monism" in a radically different sense that inverts the priority from the monism to the pluralism. I grant though that there seems to be less priority on the monism here than in Itay Shani's cosmopsychism, which seems a lot closer to, and arguably indistinct from, an existence monism, despite that he defends it as a priority monism.

though maybe it should just be called a Pluralism with Absolute Ground...

That seems better, yes.