Part 2 of 2
Neurological researchSee also: Neurotheology
Neurological research takes an empirical approach, relating mystical experiences to neurological processes.[136][137] This leads to a central philosophical issue: does the identification of neural triggers or neural correlates of mystical experiences prove that mystical experiences are no more than brain events or does it merely identify the brain activity occurring during a genuine cognitive event? The most common positions are that neurology reduces mystical experiences or that neurology is neutral to the issue of mystical cognitivity.[138]
Interest in mystical experiences and psychedelic drugs has also recently seen a resurgence.[139]
The temporal lobe seems to be involved in mystical experiences,[web 9][140] and in the change in personality that may result from such experiences.[web 9] It generates the feeling of "I," and gives a feeling of familiarity or strangeness to the perceptions of the senses.[web 9] There is a long-standing notion that epilepsy and religion are linked,[141] and some religious figures may have had temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).[web 9][142][143][141]
The anterior insula may be involved in ineffability, a strong feeling of certainty which cannot be expressed in words, which is a common quality in mystical experiences. According to Picard, this feeling of certainty may be caused by a dysfunction of the anterior insula, a part of the brain which is involved in interoception, self-reflection, and in avoiding uncertainty about the internal representations of the world by "anticipation of resolution of uncertainty or risk".[144][note 26]
Mysticism and moralityA philosophical issue in the study of mysticism is the relation of mysticism to morality. Albert Schweitzer presented the classic account of mysticism and morality being incompatible.[145] Arthur Danto also argued that morality is at least incompatible with Indian mystical beliefs.[146] Walter Stace, on the other hand, argued not only are mysticism and morality compatible, but that mysticism is the source and justification of morality.[147] Others studying multiple mystical traditions have concluded that the relation of mysticism and morality is not as simple as that.[148][149]
Richard King also points to disjunction between "mystical experience" and social justice:[150]
The privatisation of mysticism – that is, the increasing tendency to locate the mystical in the psychological realm of personal experiences – serves to exclude it from political issues as social justice. Mysticism thus becomes seen as a personal matter of cultivating inner states of tranquility and equanimity, which, rather than seeking to transform the world, serve to accommodate the individual to the status quo through the alleviation of anxiety and stress.[150]
See also• Michael Eigen
• Henology
• List of Christian mystics
• List of female mystics
• Ludus amoris
• Numinous
• Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann
• Spirit
Notes1. Note that Parmenides' "way of truth" may also be translated as "way of conviction." Parmenides (fl. late sixth or early fifth century BC), in his poem On Nature, gives an account of a revelation on two ways of inquiry. "The way of conviction" explores Being, true reality ("what-is"), which is "What is ungenerated and deathless,/whole and uniform, and still and perfect."[15] "The way of opinion" is the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful. Cook's translation "way of conviction" is rendered by other translators as "way of truth."
2. The term "mystical experience" has become synonymous with the terms "religious experience", spiritual experience and sacred experience.[17]
3. William James: "This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which bring it about that the mystical classics have, as been said, neither birthday nor native land."[16]
4. Blakemore and Jennett: "Mysticism is frequently defined as an experience of direct communion with God, or union with the Absolute, but definitions of mysticism (a relatively modern term) are often imprecise and usually rely on the presuppositions of the modern study of mysticism — namely, that mystical experiences involve a set of intense and usually individual and private psychological states [...] Furthermore, mysticism is a phenomenon said to be found in all major religious traditions.[web 6]Blakemore and Jennett add: "[T]he common assumption that all mystical experiences, whatever their context, are the same cannot, of course, be demonstrated." They also state: "Some have placed a particular emphasis on certain altered states, such as visions, trances, levitations, locutions, raptures, and ecstasies, many of which are altered bodily states. Margery Kempe's tears and Teresa of Avila's ecstasies are famous examples of such mystical phenomena. But many mystics have insisted that while these experiences may be a part of the mystical state, they are not the essence of mystical experience, and some, such as Origen, Meister Eckhart, and John of the Cross, have been hostile to such psycho-physical phenomena. Rather, the essence of the mystical experience is the encounter between God and the human being, the Creator and creature; this is a union which leads the human being to an ‘absorption’ or loss of individual personality. It is a movement of the heart, as the individual seeks to surrender itself to ultimate Reality; it is thus about being rather than knowing. For some mystics, such as Teresa of Avila, phenomena such as visions, locutions, raptures, and so forth are by-products of, or accessories to, the full mystical experience, which the soul may not yet be strong enough to receive. Hence these altered states are seen to occur in those at an early stage in their spiritual lives, although ultimately only those who are called to achieve full union with God will do so."[web 6]
5. Gelman: "Examples are experiences of the oneness of all of nature, “union” with God, as in Christian mysticism, (see section 2.2.1), the Hindu experience that Atman is Brahman (that the self/soul is identical with the eternal, absolute being), the Buddhist unconstructed experience, and “monistic” experiences, devoid of all multiplicity."[web 2]
Compare Plotinus, who argued that The One is radically simple, and does not even have self-knowledge, since self-knowledge would imply multiplicity.[24] Nevertheless, Plotinus does urge for a search for the Absolute, turning inward and becoming aware of the "presence of the intellect in the human soul," initiating an ascent of the soul by abstraction or "taking away," culminating in a sudden appearance of the One.[25]
6. Merkur: "Mysticism is the practice of religious ecstasies (religious experiences during alternate states of consciousness), together with whatever ideologies, ethics, rites, myths, legends, and magic may be related to them."[web 1]
7. Parsons: "...episodic experience and mysticism as a process that, though surely punctuated by moments of visionary, unitive, and transformative encounters, is ultimately inseparable from its embodied relation to a total religious matrix: liturgy, scripture, worship, virtues, theology, rituals, practice and the arts.[26]
8. Larson: "A mystical experience is an intuitive understanding and realization of the meaning of existence – an intuitive understanding and realization which is intense, integrating, self-authenticating, liberating – i.e., providing a sense of release from ordinary self-awareness – and subsequently determinative – i.e., a primary criterion – for interpreting all other experience whether cognitive, conative, or affective."[30]
9. McClenon: "The doctrine that special mental states or events allow an understanding of ultimate truths. Although it is difficult to differentiate which forms of experience allow such understandings, mental episodes supporting belief in "other kinds of reality" are often labeled mystical [...] Mysticism tends to refer to experiences supporting belief in a cosmic unity rather than the advocation of a particular religious ideology."[web 7]
10. Horne: "[M]ystical illumination is interpreted as a central visionary experience in a psychological and behavioural process that results in the resolution of a personal or religious problem. This factual, minimal interpretation depicts mysticism as an extreme and intense form of the insight seeking process that goes in activities such as solving theoretical problems or developing new inventions.[3]
11. Original quote in "Evelyn Underhill (1930), Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness.[33]
12. Underhill: "One of the most abused words in the English language, it has been used in different and often mutually exclusive senses by religion, poetry, and philosophy: has been claimed as an excuse for every kind of occultism, for dilute transcendentalism, vapid symbolism, religious or aesthetic sentimentality, and bad metaphysics. on the other hand, it has been freely employed as a term of contempt by those who have criticized these things. It is much to be hoped that it may be restored sooner or later to its old meaning, as the science or art of the spiritual life."[33]
13. Gellman: "Typically, mystics, theistic or not, see their mystical experience as part of a larger undertaking aimed at human transformation (See, for example, Teresa of Avila, Life, Chapter 19) and not as the terminus of their efforts. Thus, in general, ‘mysticism’ would best be thought of as a constellation of distinctive practices, discourses, texts, institutions, traditions, and experiences aimed at human transformation, variously defined in different traditions."[web 2] According to Evelyn Underhill, mysticism is "the science or art of the spiritual life."[33][note 11][note 12]
14. According to Waaijman, the traditional meaning of spirituality is a process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man, the image of God. To accomplish this, the re-formation is oriented at a mold, which represents the original shape: in Judaism the Torah, in Christianity Christ, in Buddhism Buddha, in the Islam Muhammad."[34] Waaijman uses the word "omvorming",[34] "to change the form". Different translations are possible: transformation, re-formation, trans-mutation. Waaijman points out that "spirituality" is only one term of a range of words which denote the praxis of spirituality.[35] Some other terms are "Hasidism, contemplation, kabbala, asceticism, mysticism, perfection, devotion and piety".[35]
15. McGinn: "This is why the only test that Christianity has known for determining the authenticity of a mystic and her or his message has been that of personal transformation, both on the mystic's part and—especially—on the part of those whom the mystic has affected.[23]
16. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos: "Noetic prayer is the first stage of theoria."[60]
17. Theophan the Recluse: "The contemplative mind sees God, in so far as this is possible for man."[61]
18. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos: "This is what Saint Symeon the New Theologian teaches. In his poems, proclaims over and over that, while beholding the uncreated Light, the deified man acquires the Revelation of God the Trinity. Being in "theoria" (vision of God), the saints do not confuse the hypostatic attributes. The fact that the Latin tradition came to the point of confusing these hypostatic attributes and teaching that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son also, shows the non-existence of empirical theology for them. Latin tradition speaks also of created grace, a fact which suggests that there is no experience of the grace of God. For, when man obtains the experience of God, then he comes to understand well that this grace is uncreated. Without this experience there can be no genuine "therapeutic tradition.""[60]
19. Catholic Encyclopedia: "But it was Simeon, "the new theologian" (c. 1025-c. 1092; see Krumbacher, op. cit., 152–154), a monk of Studion, the "greatest mystic of the Greek Church" (loc. cit.), who evolved the quietist theory so elaborately that he may be called the father of Hesychasm. For the union with God in contemplation (which is the highest object of our life) he required a regular system of spiritual education beginning with baptism and passing through regulated exercises of penance and asceticism under the guidance of a director. But he had not conceived the grossly magic practices of the later Hesychasts; his ideal is still enormously more philosophical than theirs."[62]
20. "Representation-only"[101] or "mere representation."[web 8]
21. Oxford reference: "Some later forms of Yogācāra lend themselves to an idealistic interpretation of this theory but such a view is absent from the works of the early Yogācārins such as Asaṇga and Vasubandhu."[web 8]
22. Yogacara postulates an advaya (nonduality) of grahaka ("grasping," cognition)[102] and gradya (the "grasped," cognitum).[102]In Yogacara-thought, cognition is a modification of the base-consciousness, alaya-vijnana.[103] According to the Lankavatara Sutra and the schools of Chan/Zen Buddhism, this unmodified mind is identical with the tathagata-garbha, the "womb of Buddhahood," or Buddha-nature, the nucleus of Buddhahood inherent in everyone. Both denoye the potentiality of attaining Buddhahood.[104] In the Lankavatara-interpretation, tathagata-garbha as a potentiality turned into a metaphysical Absolute reality which had to be realised.
23. Extending to physical immortality: the Taoist pantheon includes Xian, or immortals.
24. Compare the work of C.G. Jung.
25. The term "mystical experience" has become synonymous with the terms "religious experience", spiritual experience and sacred experience.[17]
26. See also Francesca Sacco (2013-09-19), Can Epilepsy Unlock The Secret To Happiness?, Le Temps
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Further reading
Religious and spiritual traditions• Idel, Moshe; McGinn, Bernard, eds. (2016), Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, Bloomsbury Academic
• McGinn, Bernard (1994), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. Volume 1–5, Crossroad
• Poor, Sara S.; Smith, Nigel (2015), Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750, University of Notre Dame Press
• Magee, Glenn Alexander (2016), The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism, Cambridge University Press
• Shipley, Morgan (2015), Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America, Lexington Books
• Komarovski, Yaroslav (2015), Tibetan Buddhism and Mystical Experience, Oxford University Press
Constructionism versus perennialism[edit]
• Katz, Steven T. (1978), Mysticism and philosophical analysis, OUP USA
• Forman, Robert K., ed. (1997), The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780195355116
Contextual approach• Merkur, Dan (1999), Mystical Moments and Unitive Thinking, SUNY
• Taves, Ann (2009), Religious Experience Reconsidered, Princeton: Princeton University Press
Philosophical issues[edit]
• Jones, Richard H. (2016), Philosophy of Mysticism: Raids on the Ineffable, SUNY Press
Classical• James, William (1982) [1902], The Varieties of Religious Experience, Penguin classics
• Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. 1911
• Stace, Walter Trence (1960), Mysticism and Philosophy
• Zaehner, RC (1961), Mysticism sacred and profane: an inquiry into some varieties of praeternatural experience, Oxford University Press
External links
Encyclopedias• Dan Merkur, Mysticism, Encyclopædia Britannica
• Jerome Gellmann, Mysticism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• James McClenon, Mysticism, Encyclopedia of Religion and Society
• Encyclopedia.com, Mysticism
Specific• Resources – Medieval Jewish History – Jewish Mysticism The Jewish History Resource Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Shaku soens influence on western notions of mysticism
• "Self-transcendence enhanced by removal of portions of the parietal-occipital cortex" Article from the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion