Tag Archives: mystical experience

Experiencing different ultimate unities

21 Sunday May 2023

Posted by in Consciousness, Metaphysics, Vedānta

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Defenders of cross-cultural mystical experience are right to note that in many widely varying cultures, respected sages have referred to the experience of an ultimate nonduality: a perception that everything, including oneself, is ultimately one. But one might also then rightly ask: which ultimate nonduality?

Nondualism may be the world’s most widespread philosophy, but it can mean different things – not merely different things in different places, but different things in the same place. Members of the Indian Vedānta tradition frequently proclaimed that everything is “one, without a second”, in the words of the Upaniṣads they followed. But they disagreed as to what that meant. Śaṅkara founded the Advaita Vedānta tradition – a-dvaita literally meaning non-dual – which argued that only the one, ultimate truth (sat, braḥman) was real, and all multiplicity and plurality was an illusion. His opponent Rāmānuja agreed that everything is “one, without a second” – but in his Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified nondual) school, that meant something quite different. All the many things and people we see around us – what Chinese metaphysicians called the “ten thousand things” – are parts of that ultimate one, and they are real, not illusory.

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Who cares about phenomenological similarities?

20 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, God, M.T.S.R., Meditation, Roman Catholicism

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I think one often learns the most about a philosopher from those points where her views change. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a way I think my own thought has changed recently. Ten years ago on this blog, I posted an essay that I had written ten years before that, for Robert M. Gimello’s graduate course on Buddhist meditation traditions. That paper critiques Ninian Smart’s chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of The Cloud of Unknowing?” (in Steven Katz’s Mysticism and Language). My now twenty-year-old essay tears Smart to pieces for his comparison between Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga and the fourteenth-century English The Cloud of Unknowing. And in the light of my more recent thoughts on mystical experience, I now think that tearing up went too far.

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Mystical experience across cultures

06 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Epistemology, M.T.S.R., Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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There are likely a number of religious-studies scholars who would cringe and groan at Roland Griffiths’s studies of drug-induced mystical experience. I haven’t gone into their literature in a while, but I think it would be easy for them to say Griffiths is setting the study of mysticism back many decades. Because Griffiths’s stated conception of mystical experience is one that many religionists would already have considered very dated – even when I was studying them twenty years ago.

I say this because Griffiths’s first groundbreaking study, in indicating that many psilocybin volunteers had mystical experiences, measures mystical experience using a questionnaire based on W.T. Stace‘s Mysticism and Philosophy, published in 1960. And when I was in grad school twenty years ago, Stace’s work was often considered impossibly backward.

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A speculation on Ken Wilber’s experiences

09 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by in Consciousness, Epistemology, M.T.S.R., Practice, Psychology

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As I reflected back on the works of Ken Wilber recently, a thought occurred to me: man, that guy must have done a lot of drugs.

I don’t recall Wilber ever saying anything about drugs in his work one way or the other. Given that he wrote most of his work under the restrictive régime of the late-20th-century US, that shouldn’t be a surprise; caution is valuable. Yet he is an American baby boomer deeply interested in spirituality and mysticism; that is the sort of profile that leads one to expect significant experimentation with psychoactive substances.

But more importantly than his demographic: Wilber’s philosophy is very much the sort of philosophy one would expect from someone who had had profound drug-induced mystical experiences. A theme throughout Wilber’s work is the importance of experience to knowledge, a view that Wilber’s late work comes to call “radical empiricism”. He claims throughout his work that the essentials of premodern wisdom traditions – Platonism, Buddhism, Christianity – are to be found in mystical experiences, and in replicable practices that lead up to those. Some years ago I wrote an article debunking this claim: I don’t think that a reasonable historian can look at the evidence we have of Confucius or Moses or Jesus or Zhiyi (Chih-i) and still say that the essentials of their teachings come from replicable experiences. (We could reasonably say that Moses at the burning bush was having a mystical experience, but it was not in any way replicable.)

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On chemically induced mystical experience

25 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by in Biology, Certainty and Doubt, Emotion, Epistemology, Psychology, Roman Catholicism

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One of the more exciting scholarly developments of the century to date has been the growth of studies – previously hindered for too long by legal barriers – into mystical experiences induced by psychedelic drugs. In a landmark 2006 experiment, rigorously controlled and double-blind, Roland Griffiths’s research team at Johns Hopkins University found that people given high doses of psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – typically had experiences they described as “having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance”, and bore several other characteristics in common with a certain kind of non-drug-induced mystical experience: a sense of merging with ultimate reality, a nondual sense of the unity of reality, a sense of awe or sacredness. This sort of mystical experience, it seems, can be chemically induced.

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The reasons for nondualism

21 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology, Reading and Recitation, Sufism, Vedānta

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I said previously of nondualism, “I’m not sure I can think of any other major philosophical idea that flowered so much in so many different places, more or less independently. I think that gives us prima facie reason to think the nondualists were on to something important.” Nathan reasonably took me to task for this claim in a comment: “Amod seems to overlook that ideas can be successful without being true.”

I don’t think it’s fair to say I overlooked that point: I said the pervasiveness gave us reason prima facie – at first glance – to say think the nondualists were on to something. That doesn’t mean nondualism is true, and I didn’t say that it was. Second glances might reveal something different. And where I think Nathan is right is in asking us to take those second glances. Is nondualism widespread for a reason other than its being true?

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Perennial nondualism

30 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in East Asia, God, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Neoplatonism, Self, Sufism, Vedānta

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I have spent a good deal of time criticizing the idea of a “perennial philosophy”, the idea (expressed by Ken Wilber and others before him) that the great sages of the world have always basically agreed on the really important things. In the past I had said there were perennial questions but with different answers; now I’m not even sure whether that is the case.

And yet I am struck by a particular phenomenon from which the perennialists draw a great deal of inspiration – and that is the pervasive influence of nondualism. “Nondual” is a literal English translation of the Sanskrit a-dvaita, the name of Śaṅkara’s school of Vedānta philosophy. But the core idea of nondualism has been asserted by a very wide range of philosophers around the world – from people who could never have heard of Śaṅkara, to Śaṅkara’s enemies.

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Matilal vs. Radhakrishnan

08 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism

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A little while ago on the Indian Philosophy Blog, Matthew Dasti provided a fascinating glimpse into the recent, 20th-century history of “Indian philosophy” – not the doing of it but the studying of it, the history of “secondary work” into Indian philosophy. Since Westerners have been studying Indian philosophy for literally hundreds of years now, there is a significant history there. And it is hardly new to take this second-order focus. It is old news that the way we (Indians as well as Westerners) now think about Indian traditions in general has been deeply, perhaps irrevocably, shaped by the 19th-century Orientalists. But where Matthew’s comment goes deeper is to look specifically at the discipline of philosophy – and at the 20th century, not the 19th. Continue reading →

Putting intimacy/integrity back together

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Play, Work

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Last week I submitted Thomas Kasulis’s dichotomy of intimacy and integrity worldviews to critical scrutiny. I pointed out the distinction between the epistemological element on one hand, in which intimacy knowledge is somatic and affective while integrity is self-reflective and public, and the ontological element on the other, in which intimacy sees the world as composed of internal relations and integrity sees it as made up of external relations. I noted Hegel appears to have an intimacy ontology and an integrity epistemology, while the Pali Buddhist texts appear to be the opposite – suggesting that rather than speaking of intimacy and integrity as a unity, perhaps we should break them up.

And yet while one can separate the two elements of these ideal types in this way, I suspect that one shouldn’t – because they turn out to have a deep logical relation to each other. It is one that I think Kasulis tends to leave unstated, partially because he doesn’t split up these two elements in the first place. Continue reading →

A way forward for Wilber?

28 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy

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I have not yet had a chance to hear a response from Dustin DiPerna on my post replying to his. However, his friend Mark Schmanko emailed me a response which I found utterly fascinating – one which takes up the arguments of my article as well. (I am posting these remarks with Mark’s permission.)

I had argued, following current work in religious studies like that of Robert Sharf and Wilhelm Halbfass, that replicable mystical experience is more of a modern construction than we make it out to be, certainly not something at the core of premodern traditions. The conclusion in my article argued that, if my claims were true, a Wilberian could take two legitimate options: either rethink Wilber’s model heavily so as to incorporate the non-mystical elements of traditions, or “bite the bullet” and admit that it is accepting only the mystical elements and not other elements that would be closer to the tradition’s cores. Continue reading →