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Arthur C. Clarke, James Frazer, mystical experience, nondualism, Roland Griffiths, Stonehill College, technology
While lecturing at Stonehill I made a comment about some traditional practice, I don’t remember which, that it was “less mystical and more magical.” Or maybe it was the reverse. What I remember clearly is that, as I was about to move on, one brave and perceptive student raised her hand to ask “Could you maybe explain the difference between magical and mystical?”
I paused for a moment, a little stunned by the reminder that I hadn’t explained that distinction. I was very grateful for the question: of course I should have explained the distinction, how could I have expected them to know it? The question reminded me that the distinction between magic and mysticism is something I tend to take for granted – even though it is not at all obvious to a layperson. It’s also quite important – for the key reason that the claims of mysticism are more likely to be true than those of magic. Or at the least, they are less unscientific – likely to conflict with the evidence of natural science. So it’s a key distinction I keep in mind when I read works like Jeffrey Kripal’s The Flip, which argue for viewing the world in ways that go beyond the natural-sceintific.
I believe it was James Frazer who first used “magic” as a category to explain social practices. Magic and technology are very similar: they are both attempts at efficacious action, attempts to make the world behave as you want it to, attempts at causing effects. The difference is: can one reliably and predictably observe that the action actually causes the effect, regularly and successfully, in the way that it is claimed to? If one can, then it is technology – applied science. If one cannot, then it’s magic. Now one can’t always tell what falls into which category – the jury may still be out on acupuncture, for example – but it’s no knock on the categories to say we don’t always know what falls where. (If you’re in a sealed room with no internet, you don’t know whether it’s sunny or raining outside, but that doesn’t mean the categories of “sunny or raining outside” are meaningless.)
The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clarke’s sense of “magic” in the quote is different: that is, he means that its workings will be so complex as to be utterly mysterious. But when speaking of magic as something that human beings actually practise, in Frazer’s anthropological sense, one could turn the quote around and say any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology, in that it would work with a relatively high degree of reliability as technology does.
Mysticism, however, is different from both magic and technology. It’s not supposed to be efficacious; it’s not there to accomplish something, beyond perhaps a transformation within the mystic herself. I most commonly use “mysticism” or “mystical” to speak of mystical experience – experiences that one can induce through drugs or meditation or other means, but which can also come unbidden, like Moses seeing the burning bush or Teresa pierced by the angel. The mystic enters a different state of consciousness – in which one is typically less capable of efficacious action, of affecting the world, because one’s mind is in some respect in a different world. But that’s okay, because unlike with magic, one is not trying to affect the world. In the Sanskrit-derived Sinhalese terms, magic is laukika, mysticism is lōkōttara. There are other senses of “mysticism” which are less focused on experience – like the idea that the divine is unexplainable – but these similarly direct our attention away from efficacious this-worldly action.
The claims of magic, it seems to me, are mostly false: once there is reliable evidence for a magical claim’s truth, it ceases to be magic and starts to become technology. The “mostly” is important, though. There are some magical claims that might turn out to be true on further research, though usually not for the reasons claimed for them. But we also need to pay attention to the very real sorts of effects that we call psychosomatic or placebo effect. Often enough, people who believe strongly enough in faith-healing actually are healed in response to it. We dismiss such effects on the grounds that “it only worked because you believed in it”, and that claim is correct, but it doesn’t change the fact that it worked! Science needs to pay careful attention to what is caused by placebo effect and what isn’t – thus medical science’s emphasis on double-blind trials – because belief is tricky, and things that work irrespective of belief are more effective. The effects of belief are real: drinkers of the same water had different neurological effects depending on whether they were told it was regular water or holy water from Lourdes! There is still reason to say magic’s claims are mostly false, though, in that these effects do not work for the reasons they are claimed to work; it is clearly not any intrinsic holiness of Lourdes water that causes the healing.
Mysticism, I think, has a stronger claim to truth, because its claims, unlike the claims of magic, are not about cause and effect in the empirical world. For that reason it is harder to verify or falsify them. (Logical positivists like A.J. Ayer claimed that such empirically untestable claims are either meaningless or trivial tautologies, but that claim of Ayer’s is itself empirically untestable, and therefore we overall have more reason to listen even to magical claims than to a claim as obviously self-falsifying as Ayer’s.) There are some cases where mystical experience is potentially replicable – psilocybin, meditation, Sufi chanting – which is where Ken Wilber gets his claim that the truths of the contemplative traditions are “open to all who wish to try the experiment…” But many such experiences simply come, unbidden, unreplicable.
However they come, many mysical experiences are accompanied by a sense of certainty. One of the notable results of Griffiths’s psilocybin studies is that the studies’ subjects had a strong conviction that what they perceived was real. Their certainty doesn’t oblige us to believe them, by any means, but neither is it something we should dismiss. For a large number of the claims they are making are not unscientific; they are not about the sorts of things that can be tested by scientific experiment, because they are not about cause and effect in the physical world.
The content of those experiences is many and varied – yet it is a regular pattern, across many and varied cultures, for it to come out as some form of nondualism. That doesn’t amount to a knockdown argument that nondualism is true. But it is reason to take nondualism seriously – especially when accompanied by the logical arguments for it. And this is a significant difference from magic. We have good reason to believe that magical cause and effect works because of the placebo effect and related psychosomatic causes, and this is generally a sufficient enough explanation for its working that we do not need to take most of magic’s claims seriously. I do not think we have any such explanation sufficient to rule out the claims of mysticism.
Amod, I think you’re using a bit of “magic” in your argument!
I would say that what people experience while on drugs is certainly “about cause and effect in the physical world”: they are experiencing the effects that a physical drug has caused in their physical brain! And when those people have a nondualistic meaning-system in their brains, it is no surprise that they interpret those effects nondualistically.
Wouldn’t it be an argument form rather like begging the question to conclude that I should take nondualism seriously because other people who have meaning-systems in their brains that cause them to interpret the effects of a drug nondualistically interpret the effects of a drug nondualistically? That seems to be the conclusion of this post (“it is reason to take nondualism seriously” that people interpret the effects of a drug nondualistically) once we take into account that people are meaning-makers who interpret their experiences.
I see a close connection between magic and mysticism as they are defined in this post: both involve people’s meaning-systems. Medical anthropologist Daniel Moerman wrote an article with Wayne Jonas titled “Deconstructing the placebo effect and finding the meaning response” (Annals of Internal Medicine, 136(6), 2002, 471–6). It proposed focusing on people’s meaning-making in situations involving the placebo effect. When we do that, we see that both magic and mysticism are the result of people making meaning of their experiences in a certain way.
“Falsity” (deceptiveness) does not necessarily distinguish a placebo’s magic from mysticism, because some placebos (so-called open-label placebos) can have a “magical” effect even when people know they are receiving a placebo (Ted J. Kaptchuk & Franklin G. Miller (2018), “Open label placebo: can honestly prescribed placebos evoke meaningful therapeutic benefits?”, BMJ: British Medical Journal, 363, k3889). Also consider another kind of “magic”: an illusionist. Even when you know someone is an illusionist, you can still experience the effect or illusion that the illusionist performs as if it were real.
We can easily imagine ourselves in situations, if we haven’t already been in them, where we don’t know whether we are receiving the real drug or the placebo (as in a randomized double-blind trial of a drug versus placebo), and then, when we feel an effect that we would attribute to the drug, we are in a state of uncertainty about what caused the effect. Likewise, we might encounter a stranger on the street who does something “magical”, and then we find ourselves wondering whether that person was an illusionist or someone with special miraculous powers. These are situations where we are trying to determine the meaning of what happened to us. Mysticism is much the same: it’s an attempt to determine the meaning of an experience.
So I don’t buy your argument that mysticism is significantly different from magic in that we should take the former seriously but not the latter. Actually, we are still faced with same challenge (should we choose to accept it) in both magic and mysticism: how to determine the meaning of what has happened. (In your account, it seems that magic is mostly about making meaning of some anomalous effect outside one’s body, whereas mysticism is about making meaning of some anomalous effect inside one’s body.)
I said “the meaning of what [has] happened”, but I should have said “the meaning of what happens”, because our meaning-systems not only interpret the remembered past; they also attempt to anticipate what is going to happen, and that anticipation or expectation plays a huge role in meaning-making in magic and mysticism and any other kind of experiencing. It’s a continuous process of anticipating and re-interpreting shifting states. The figure (diagram) from Hutchinson & Barrett’s “The power of predictions” that I linked to in a previous comment is relevant here as well.
When people have a reductionist materialist meaning-system in their brains, it’s no surprise that they interpret claims about the ultimate nature of reality solely in terms of cause and effect in the physical world. Wouldn’t it be an argument form rather like begging the question to take seriously the idea that claims about the nondual nature of reality are “about cause and effect in the physical world”, just because people who have meaning-systems in their brains that cause them to interpret those claims materialistically interpret those claims materialistically?
If you refuse to engage with the content of mystics’ claims and instead reduce those claims to their psychological or sociological origins, well, hey presto, I can do the same with yours. The basic move that excites every Religious Studies 101 undergrad: “OMG, I can explain these people’s beliefs in my terms instead of engaging with them on theirs! I’m so much smarter than they are!” That move loses a lot of its lustre once you turn it back on itself.
If you think it’s me who has a reductionist materialist meaning-system in my brain, you would be wrong in a way that makes your rebuttal irrelevant. I’m happy to engage with the content of mystics’ claims together with all other knowledge in a way that is as integrated as possible. In fact, Seth and I did engage with some content of those claims in a string of comments on the post that you linked to above as being about nondualism. In my first comment there, I said, referring to an article by Woods et al. titled “Evidence synthesis indicates contentless experiences in meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical”:
I believe that we can’t reach an accurate and comprehensive account of experiencing unless we consider as much knowledge as possible about how experiencing works. I don’t reduce experiencing to how it works, and I don’t say that I have infallible knowledge about how it works; I just say that we can’t understand experiencing well without considering how it works. And that applies as much to my own mystical experiences as to someone else’s! (As a long-time Zen practitioner and student, I’ve been engaging seriously with philosophical content that could be called “nondualistic”, and some that is frankly “magical”, for many years.) If another person were to tell me that I’m missing some important knowledge from their perspective, I would listen to them and try to integrate that knowledge with the rest of my knowledge. But if that other person were to tell me that nothing that anybody knows about brain and body is relevant to understanding mysticism (or magic!), and that I can only understand mysticism (or magic) by rejecting that knowledge and using only the other person’s emic terms in which there is no connection between what they have experienced and the world of cause and effect, I would say that they are missing some important knowledge from my perspective.
I’m referring to you as having a reductionist-materialist meaning system based on your first post above. It sure seems to be implied in your claim that the content of mystical claims is “about cause and effect in the physical world”. Mystical experiences have physical causes, sure; that’s not being disputed, it would be a little bizarre to say that the experience you get on psilocybin has no causes. But it’s not the point of the mystical claims. A magical claim is of the form “if I do X, then Y will happen” – if I do this dance, I make it rain. A mystical claim is not – it is about the nature of reality in a way that does not have to do with that causal efficacy. On a reductionist understanding, that doesn’t matter: the content of the claim is woo-woo bullshit anyway, so all we really need to understand is the physical causes of the experience that led someone to make the claim. It’s about the cause and effect, just like the magic is, in a way that makes no reference to anything that is actually being claimed by the mystic. I don’t see how you get to “mystical claims are about cause and effect” without that reductionist refusal to engage with the claim about reality. (It sounds a lot like saying that the mystical claims are not-even-wrong.)
I did mention, briefly, that there are mystical claims that don’t rely on experience, like claims about divine ineffability. Are those “about cause and effect” too?
Sorry about the runaway link in my previous comment: I accidentally closed the anchor tag with a different tag.
To respond to your last paragraph first: a mystical claim about divine ineffability seems to me to be epistemological: it’s the claim that ultimate reality, or everything, or whatever you call it, and all of its aspects, is too big or extreme to be experienced, known, cognized, and/or symbolized. But this too can be understood with the help of causal analysis, for example, it’s ineffable because our information processing capacities and lifespans are insufficient to do all the information processing that would be required to cognize everything. It’s physically impossible, like making a map that would be the same as the territory. Leibniz already analyzed the issue in similar terms. When we look at the mystical claim of divine ineffability in terms of cause and effect, it helps us understand the claim better.
I think we could say of both magic and mysticism that they are more or less undertheorized by their proponents. You already said that the more reliably an action can be repeated, the more it becomes less like magic and more like technology. You mentioned that technology is related to applied science: at least, advanced technology involves applied science. Generalizing this insight about magic to both magic and mysticism, I would say: the more both magic and mysticism are better theorized by their proponents, the more magic and mysticism tend to converge to integrated knowledge of action and reality.
In my previous comment, I speculated: “magic is mostly about making meaning of some anomalous effect outside one’s body, whereas mysticism is about making meaning of some anomalous effect inside one’s body”. Now I think the outside/inside distinction was a mistake. Perhaps the distinction is that magic is more about claims about causality of efficacious action, and mysticism is more about claims about ultimate reality, or everything, or whatever you call it (but that can still be understood in a way that’s integrated with causality!). I don’t think that either magic or mysticism is inherently more likely to be true or false. I would look at how well theorized each is, i.e. how much a proponent of either magic or mysticism has achieved an integrated knowledge of action and reality. The more they have, the less I would be inclined to call them a magician or a mystic; I would call them a wise and knowledgeable person, a pandita.
A claim about ineffability is epistemological, yes, but it’s also metaphysical (/ontological): to say that we can’t know ultimate reality is a claim both about the knowledge and about the reality. And yes, the epistemological side of that claim can then be understood in terms of causal analysis – but it doesn’t have to be. That’s a perfectly reasonable step for you to take as you try to engage with the claim, but it’s not there in the claim in itself (which might in some cases rather be that our inability to know the thing follows from the nature of the thing, rather than of our knowledge). It’s an extra step you took.
There’s a lot of work being done in “it helps us understand the claim better.” If a biologist writes long eloquent essays attacking the intelligent-design movement, we might understand him better if we know that he was raised by abusive fundamentalists and see that that trauma gave him a lifelong desire to prove them wrong. But I think that there’s only a very distant sense in which that knowledge helps us understand the claims in the essays. If that’s where we focus, we’re basically refusing to engage with him on his terms and insisting we only engage on ours.
The approach you’re taking in this response is reminding me a bit of Ken Wilber, whose work I do like but which I think has a lot of limits. Wilber tends to be so eager to fit every idea into his larger system of theorizing that he doesn’t take the time to understand the ideas as they are in themselves, their own internal logic. I think that when we do that, when our sense of understanding jumps straight into putting it in our own terms without first getting its own internal logic as it is in itself, we lose the opportunity to be challenged by the ideas we’re reading and encountering.
Your first paragraph of your last comment may point to the inescapably dialogical nature of philosophizing. Yes, I added something to the claim, but I don’t see how I can escape doing that without merely listening or simply repeating what the other said. (Regarding the content of the claim, you said it may be that “our inability to know the thing follows from the nature of the thing, rather than of our knowledge”, but the quick analysis I gave made claims about the nature of both the known/unknown and the knower. So it was my bad to call it epistemological; my analysis was both epistemological and ontological.)
There is such a thing as a sound ad hominem argument, and one might be relevant for the abused biologist, not as a replacement for engaging with his arguments but as an important part of considering all relevant information. I’m all for mixing discourse and meta-discourse. Mix it up! Let’s go as meta as we can, I say. If you wanna know why I’m being a jerk, just ask me or give a hypothesis!
If I sound like Ken Wilber, then I’m doing something wrong! I agree about the importance of being challenged by (seemingly) strange ideas, but often such ideas have nothing to say about problems that I think are important, especially, as I said, how it all works. I’m a big fan of Yogācāra, which isn’t much like modern science, but I find Yogācāra easy to connect with modern psychology and epistemology. I doubt I would be interested in Yogācāra if I couldn’t make such a connection to problems that are important to me. I can do pure exegesis of Yogācāra texts, but only because I have a reason to be interested in them beyond their intrinsic value as texts.
This is interesting. Magic may be mostly false but when people believe it, the effects of belief, positive or negative, can be profound. The same can be said for mysticism, I think. I claim belief is a foundation of what I call contextual reality. There are numerous beliefs and one person or group may have belief(s) not shared by others. In purely lay terms, * what is reality? Whatever I say it is!* Of course this is not reality in a practical sense. Generally, people will agree that water is wet, exists as a liquid, solid or vapor and is marginally breathable only in its’ gaseous state. This is physics—neither magical nor mystical. Some might argue that logic. Contextual reality is reality in its’ own limited sense, and so are magic and mysticism. Belief in something endows that something with power, if only over those who believe it.
The problem, as I see it, is how to adjucate conflicting claims about mystical experience. If I have an experience that is non-dual and unitive, and if Martin Buber (to use an example) has an experience that reality is funadamentally a dualistic dialogue between I and Thou, how can you, I, or anyone judge whose experience is more essentially valid as a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality? I think, in the end, I (personally) can only adopt a pragmatic approach and point to how both of these visions describe important aspects of reality, but I can’t point to convincing evidence that indicates that one vision seems fundamentally truer than the other.
Here’s a suggestion: Why not try resolving such a conflict through dialogue focused on learning, with mediation if necessary? See if dialectical syntheses are possible that would integrate the conflicting claims into more comprehensive knowledge.
Abstractly, the perspectivism that says that each person’s vision can “describe important aspects of reality”, as Seth said, is part of the solution. Another part of the solution is the coherentism that says that any “metaphysical statement about the nature of reality” is embedded in a meaning-system or theory that can be judged by various criteria of systematicity. And another part of the solution is the developmental constructivism that says that we are unfinished developing minds that learn by encountering and integrating new information, including new information about other people’s different perspectives. And who knows how we will experience reality after we achieve such new coherent integrations?
The conflict is the symptom; dialogue is the treatment; cognitive development, new knowledge, and new experiencing may be the outcome.
I mentioned perspectivism, coherentism, and developmental constructivism as aspects of a philosophy of dialogue. It occurred to me later that there is another aspect, a word that Seth mentioned: the pragmatism that says that anything can be judged by how successful it is at achieving a purpose. Pragmatism always implies the question: successful for what purpose? “Truth” indicates success at achieving some logical, semantic, or epistemic purpose: coherentism is associated with such purposes. But we should also consider that magic and mysticism may have other purposes in addition to, or instead of, the logical, semantic, or epistemic: for example, aesthetic or social purposes. Dialogue should also consider pragmatic differences in criteria of success.
The differences between mystical claims are hugely important, for sure. How do we address them? I think that to say that “both of these visions describe important aspects of reality” is not merely pragmatic, it’s itself taking a side on their truth claims. (You don’t need to say that one is truer in order to do that, and maybe you shouldn’t.) You are thereby effectively putting forth your own vision of reality, as a larger picture, which recognizes each of the two as important of aspects of it. I think that’s actually quite a helpful approach to take, and my own approach may end up there. The trick is then in the details: which aspect of ultimate reality do we take one to be representing, which aspect is the other, and (trickiest of all) what is the relationship between the two?
I think it’s best to give up claims to anything being “ultimate reality” — when have such claims ever gotten us anywhere useful in the past? — and also to give up on a single integrated theory that can include everything—everything being not only the nature of mind and material reality, not only quantum mechanics and relativity, but also ethical, aesthetic, historical, and political “reality.” Instead we can come up with “little” theories that partially describe and predict within one or two domains in ways that are useful for us given our purposes and projects in the world. If the little theories are in some ways incompatible, so be it, as long as they are useful in their domains of application. A “larger” theory of how disparate domains might be interelated is something we may aspire to but may be beyond our reach for now. For me the question of nondual vs. dualistic accounts is purely pragmatic—if I view the world through a nondual lens, are their certain problems that are important to me that seem to yield valuable insights I wouldn’t have gotten had I viewed the world through a dualistic lens, and vice versa. I’m not sure there is anything one can meaningfully say beyond that.
In addition to Seth’s espoused pragmatism, I would point out that Seth is a Zen priest, and there is aversion in much of Zen teaching to conceiving of religious experience as cognitive access to an ultimate reality that transcends the senses. Thinking that one could have such access is the Zen definition of “delusion” by some accounts. Here’s a quote about that aversion from Eshin Nishimura:
For Nishimura, awakening is “the return from intellect to the senses” or “transcendence into the senses”.
Come, let us reason together. Not a bad idea. Not bad at all.