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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Robert Forman

Experiencing different ultimate unities

21 Sunday May 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Consciousness, Metaphysics, Vedānta

≈ 6 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, mystical experience, nondualism, perennialism, phenomenology, Rāmānuja, Robert Forman, Śaṅkara, Seth Zuihō Segall, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī, Teresa of Ávila, Upaniṣads, W.T. Stace

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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Mystical experience across cultures

06 Sunday Nov 2022

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

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Bhagavad Gītā, Dov Baer, drugs, Meister Eckhart, mystical experience, nondualism, perennialism, phenomenology, Robert Forman, Robert M. Gimello, Roland Griffiths, Steven Katz, Teresa of Ávila, Theosophy, W.T. Stace, Yoga Sūtras

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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