There seem to be many different notions about the nature of the mystical which appear to reflect the distinctive characteristics of the individual traditions in which they evolved. We will look at descriptions of mystical experience in three traditions: Roman Catholicism, Mahayana Buddhism and Early Daoism (specifically the fourth century B.C. Daoist Zhuangzi) and show that in each case, the reports of mystical experience are significantly different. We will see that these differences can be explained in terms of other important beliefs found within these respective traditions. In order to illustrate this, for each of our three traditions, we will describe (1) its basic metaphysical beliefs about the nature of the world, (2) its notion of personhood and (3 ) its particular form of mysticism. (Note handout). But before we get to these issues, we need to define some basic terms of art.
A good deal of ink and perhaps some blood has been spilled over a proper definition of religion. I hope mine is proper at least in the sense that it works to highlight the issues at hand. DEF: A religion is a comprehensive view about the nature of reality that provides human beings with answers to questions of ultimate value. Religions are comprehensive ways of seeing the world: they have definite views about the way the world really is. This is what we mean by our number (1): their "basic metaphysical beliefs." But religions are more than this. Modern physics is a comprehensive view about the way the world really is and yet it usually is not regarded as a religion (though people like Carl Sagan and Fritjof Capra occasionally talk this way and always sound silly when they do). The metaphysical views of religions, unlike physics, provide human beings with fairly clear answers to questions of ultimate value: they tell people how they should be living their lives. Now Marxism is a view about the nature of the world that tells people how they should live life but it is not a comprehensive view as it only concerns the economic aspects of human life. The kind of comprehensive view that is characteristic of religions, by definition, must contain some account of what people are. And as religions provide guidance for how we should lead our lives, this aspect of their view of the world, i.e. their view of what it is to be a person, is a prominent part of their teachings -- our number (2) "personhood."
The next term of art we need to define is "mystical experience." We will understand mystical experience as an individual's personal experience of the central metaphysical beliefs characteristic of his or her particular religion. I do not mean that a person who has had a mystical experience would describe it this way, but I believe they would agree the experience is a personal realization of such beliefs. Such experiences cannot be reduced to such beliefs nor am I claiming that such beliefs are necessary background conditions for having such experiences. Beliefs can be described in words and an important feature of mystical experience is that words cannot adequately convey the experience. But we will be discussing reports of mystical experience and how the se relate to stated beliefs about the world and the people in it. We cannot experience another person's mystical experience anymore than we can dream another person's dreams. But we can discuss and examine reports of mystical experience and as is the case with reports of dreams, such an inquiry can tell us important things about the beliefs and activities of the people who have them.
According to the metaphysical orientation of Catholicism, there is a fundamental rift in the cosmos between the temporal, unstable realm of everyday life and the eternal, unchanging sacred realm. Because there is this division between the sacred and the profane, Catholics tend to see the religious task in terms of bridging the gap between the two realms. The religious life is on the one hand the attempt to realize God's plan here on earth while at the same time recognizing that this is metaphysically impossible, given our frail and imperfect form and capacities. So the religious life also looks beyond this vale of tears to the sacred realm as its ultimate goal. Given that the sacred and profane realms are so different neither of these twin goals can be achieved through human power alone. We need God's help and it comes to us in the form of grace. It is important to realize that while a gulf separates our world from the divine, there is an intimate relationship between the sacred and profane realms: ours i s a reflection of this higher realm, created and sustained by God. We are created in the image of God and everything in our world is God's work and part of his plan.
Mahayana Buddhists have a very different view of how the world really is. Instead of sacred and profane, they see things in terms of reality and delusion. Many people say the Buddhists think the everyday world is an illusion but it is better to remember t hat it is worse than this. An illusion, like a movie or a play, is not necessarily harmful to you and may be part of a full and healthy life. A delusion is debilitating and harmful. If we are watching a play in which someone is murdered and we react by gunning down the actor who plays the murderer, the pleasant illusion of the play has become a delusion for us. Buddhists claim that the world we perceive is a delusion. Tress, chairs you and I are not what we appear to be and to insist that the world is as it appears to be is the source of all our problems. To the enlightened Buddhist most of us act like primitives who do not realize they are watching a movie and react to the action on the screen not only by crying and laughing but by shooting arrows at the screen, at each other and at ourselves.
For the Buddhist reality lies beneath the world of appearances and is accessible to those dedicated to seeking it out. We do not need to rely on outside sacred powers. Indeed a full realization of the truth can never come from such a source. The act of coming to realize and embrace the true nature of the world itself has the power to relieve our suffering. It frees us from our debilitating delusion as one who comes to fully understand the true nature of a neurosis or self-deception. The ultimate goal of t he religious life is not to go somewhere else, some higher realm of reality, it is to be where you really are, to see the world as it truly is.
Mahayana Buddhists maintain that there are no things in the world, in the sense that we normally think of the world as a collection of things. This is not to say that the world is nothing or meaningless -- widespread misrepresentations of the Buddhist view . Rather it is to claim that the things in the world we perceive have no unchanging, independent existence. The things of the world are collections of interrelated, ever-changing constituent elements. Though these follow certain causal laws governing their formation and dissolution, the things they form, when they join together have no internal essence. (Example of the Chariot).
In our normal way of viewing the world, we perceive it as a collection of independently existing things, and in so doing we generate a wide variety of false notions about the world, particularly concerning individual persistence through time. These lead u s to become attached to things and states of being. This inevitably leads to an unsatisfactory life because the moments of our lives and the things we want to endure do not persist. Indeed, as we shall see below, the most pernicious deception we indulge i n is that we ourselves are independently existing entities.
The Daoist perspective is very much a "this-worldly" religion. The world we perceive is real and it is the only one we've got. Salvation is to be found in this world and during one's lifetime. Daoism is a religion of organism in the sense that it sees the world as unified, interrelated and largely harmonious. The goal is to get all the constituent members of this organism, particularly human beings, functioning according to their nature. The problems of the world can all be traced to a single source: human beings are failing in their role. It is not that people are failing to act or even so much that they are acting improperly; the problem arises in the self-conscious desire to act itself. Human beings tend to overstep their natural boundary, forsake the true path or Dao and thereby upset the cosmic order.
Daoists believe the universe follows a grand design, a natural order. However they do not grant human beings any privileged status within the natural order or any special access to the cosmic plan. Those who claim such status or boast of such knowledge se e themselves as above and apart from nature's patterns and processes. This leads them to move farther away from and lose sight of their natural, spontaneous tendencies. They subvert the natural harmony by claiming for themselves a privileged and dominant position in the great scheme of things.
According to the Daoist, in order to understand and harmonize with Nature's grand scheme, we need to stop trying to figure it all out. Thinking about things won't help, for this involves projecting our limited human perspective onto the rest of Nature. Following our higher, rational faculties places us out of touch with important parts of what we are; we fall out of synch with our natural urges, out of step with the great dance of Nature.
Since this world was created and is sustained by powers from the sacred realm, it cannot be dismissed as absolutely evil. Similarly, we cannot completely shed the profane part of ourselves without rejecting that part of the divine. This tension is largely resolved by seeing the profane world and the physical aspects of ourselves not as evil but rather as imperfect and disordered. We are capable of substantial self-improvement. We can order ourselves and thereby make ourselves worthy of God's saving Grace. As imperfect creatures we cannot work for salvation in any way other than through the medium of this imperfect realm.
In such a view, the self is seen as a hierarchy of parts that are nearer to or farther from the perfection of the sacred. The religious life is the task of bringing these various parts into their proper order, insuring that the higher, more perfect faculties order and control the lower less perfect aspects of the self. We do not reject but order the lower parts of our self.
Buddhism is well known for its denial of a separate, independently existing self. This view follows directly from their metaphysical beliefs about the nature of reality. The notion of a separate, independently existing self is simply a token of the more general type of error we make when we believe in separate and independently existing things. Buddhists argue that we too are part of an infinitely extended stream of related moments of existence, brought into being through the power of various causes and conditions. Instead of being separate, independently existing souls, apart from other beings, we are related to all sentient creatures by innumerable past relationships and lives. We are as much a part of their stream as they are of ours and so in a deep sense we are "one." Thus instead of nihilism and indifference, a true perception of reality leads to Mahakaruna "great compassion": an all-inclusive care for all sentient creatures.
Buddhists argue that the mis-perception that there is an independent self arises when the ever-changing constellations of constituent elements that make up the self are understood as a single, separate and unchanging thing. We make a similar perceptual error when we interpret the quickly passing frames of a motion picture to be an uninterrupted, visual story and then go on to react to this story as if it were reality. This false sense of an independent "I" leads us to strive to preserve this "I" and to fulfill its desires. This only serves to reinforce the impression. This process is repeated through endless rounds of existence until with enough effort of the right kind, the process is reversed.
Daoists see the self as real; completely of and in this world. But they do not see human beings as in any particular way critical to cosmic harmony. If human beings have any distinction at all it is their propensity to disrupt the natural harmony by attempting to make the world over in their image. Daoists see our true self in natural simplicity, at that stage in human history when intellect was still young and obedient to instinct. We are rather loose confederations of parts: physical, intellectual, emotional instinctual. None of these can lay claim as the legitimate governor of the self and so we must be on guard against the tyranny of those parts which tend to "ride roughshod" over the rest -- our intellect and emotions. Any attempt to socialize the self, to train it to follow anything but the natural order, is seen as harmful and deforming. The true self is fluid and flexible and should be allowed to "wander" through the world, responding with skill to the situations it encounters. As Zhuangzi says, we should learn to "walk without touching the ground."
Individuals are not obliterated or fundamentally altered in this encounter with the divine. They may feel spiritually invigorated and it may "change their life" in terms of reorienting their priorities, but they still experience the absolute while maintaining their earthly form. This kind of intimacy is possible, as opposed to what we see in more dualistic religions, because of the belief that the sacred realm created and sustains the profane realm and that people in particular are made in the image of the divine.
Such encounters cannot be described adequately in words because the vocabulary available to finite beings cannot possibly capture the infinite. However, mystics in this tradition while overwhelmed and rendered speechless during such encounters, go to considerable length and detail after such experiences, describing them. Again, this is because the finite world, and the vocabulary it generates, can approximate the sacred. The sacred world is not wholly other (not like the dualism of Manicheism); it is like this world, only infinitely better. One can extrapolate from this world and gain some sense of the divine. For example, God's love is like human love only infinite in its depth and extension. However, one can not give a complete account of the mystical experience because our language is all-too-human. It is simply inadequate to the task.
Buddhists claim that our normal view of the world is a delusion. In truth there is a kind of identity or unity between the self and the world. Those who achieve the highest spiritual state perceive this and experience what we shall call a mysticism of unity. It is described in terms of metaphors like a drop of water (the self) dissolving into a boundless sea (the universe). This insight into the true nature of things has salvific power, it releases us from the grip of our debilitating delusions. Of course this requires both an affective (emotional) as well as a cognitive (intellectual) grasp of the truth and for most people this requires a regimen of meditational practice as well as philosophical study.
The ineffability of the mystical experience is more prominent in Buddhism than in almost any form of Christianity because Buddhism's underlying metaphysical view claims that the perceived world is not true or real. Our mistaken perception of the world is the very cause of our low spiritual condition. Since our language depends upon our experience and our experience is false, our language too is deformed and unreliable. It is worse than just being false; it is a symptom of our spiritual disease and a force keeping us from finding a cure. And so it is not simply that our normal vocabulary is inadequate, it is wholly inapplicable. It can not begin to describe reality. At best, language can point the way out of itself and serve to illustrate its own inadequacies. Buddhists tend to describe the mystical experience by a denial of predicates, i.e. in terms of what it is not. Westerners who study Buddhism are often tempted to correlate our concepts with theirs, which can lead to profound misconceptions. For example, many liken the ultimate spiritual state of Buddhism, Nirvana either with "extinction" or "bliss". But Nirvana is neither of these. The first attempt leads to the profoundly mistaken view that enlightenment leads to "nihilism" or "indifference" while t he latter view leads to idea that Nirvana is an exceedingly pleasant state, a kind of profound egoistic hedonism. But both these interpretations presuppose an experiencing subject trying to understand the world and her place in it. Buddhism denies the reality of this very subject.
Zhuangzi's form of Daoism produces yet another type of mysticism: what we shall call performance mysticism. This is best understood as analogous to the experience of being completely absorbed in the performance of some task. For example, those moments when, lost in the movement, there are no dancers but only the dance. Zhuangzi himself offers this kind of example in his descriptions of skillful individuals.
For Zhuangzi, the ultimate spiritual state, a personal realization of the Dao or Way, is ineffable but for distinctive reasons. The mystical experience occurs in skillful performances that rely more on instinct and experience than on intellect. They lie between the lines of any description. As is the case with all skills, language can help us begin to understand, but at a certain point language can also interfere with skillful performance. Any heightened sense of self or self-consciousness often will undermine a skillful performance. The most skillful performances happen when we lose ourselves in the task at hand and are guided by spontaneous knack. In such moments, we are "in the groove," our actions "flow," and seem to be directed and powered by forces beyond the self. Conclusion:
I have managed to say quite a lot about the ineffable, which doubtless is a clear sign of my own low spiritual state. But I have only talked about what others have said in their reports of experiences I have not shared. We have seen that these reports reveal that their experiences are to a large measure informed by other beliefs of the religious tradition from which they emerge. So on the one hand, this leads me to doubt that any mystical tradition defines a single type of experience that unites and to so me degree defines religious experience. Such experiences might share something, but it is a much thinner "something" than most claim. On the other hand, I do not find the kind of "linguistic eliminativism" that some folks argue for particularly convincing . This view depends on the assumption that language goes "all the way down" in our thinking. But I don't accept, as some contemporary philosophers do, that the only information we have of the world is what we know through language. This view seems to me clearly wrong. Prelinguistic infants make quite a few significant discriminations about the world and seem to recognize states of affairs without having anything that I recognize as language. And animals whose experiences are profoundly alien to me, for ex ample, Tom Nagel's bat, seem to know a good deal about the same world as I do. I think that there may well be something like a common insight to be found across many mystical traditions. Perhaps it will turn out to be something like Freud's "oceanic feeling." Most religions will find this disappointing, as such a feeling cannot be used to provide any substantial support for most of their doctrines. But it may turn out that such a feeling is a part of our experience of the world and one that, contrary to Freud, might be part of a mature and healthy human life. It may well have a substantial future.