⁂ Concepts · Sacred · No. 195
Mysticism

Two opposite conclusions drawn by people who agree entirely about the data.

Mysticism

Experience reported as direct contact with ultimate reality - and the question of whether it is evidence of anything.

Theme
Cosmos, the sacred and ultimate reality
Tradition
Cross-tradition
Term fixed
1902

In plain terms

People across every tradition report experiences with a recognisable shape: a sense of unity, a loss of the usual boundary between self and world, an impression of encountering something more real than ordinary experience, and a conviction that it cannot be put into words.

The reports are real, the convergence is striking, and what follows from it is entirely disputed.

One reading takes the convergence as evidence: people in unconnected traditions are describing one thing, and the best explanation is that they are encountering it.

The other reading is that the descriptions are shaped by what the person already believes. Christian mystics meet Christ, Buddhist practitioners find emptiness, and the experience arrives already interpreted - so the convergence is in the summarising rather than in the experience.

As a philosopher would put it

James's four marks - ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity - remain the standard characterisation, and his treatment made mysticism a subject for philosophy of religion rather than only for theology.

The central dispute is between perennialism and constructivism. Stace's perennialism distinguishes extrovertive from introvertive experience and holds that a pure consciousness event, without content, occurs across traditions and is then interpreted. Katz's constructivism denies it: there are no unmediated experiences, the mystic's tradition shapes what is experienced rather than only what is said afterwards, and the apparent convergence is produced by scholars comparing summaries.

Forman's reply defends the pure consciousness event on the strength of reports that specifically describe contentless awareness.

The evidential question is separate. Swinburne's principle of credulity - that experiences should be taken at face value absent defeaters - grounds an argument from religious experience; critics note that the traditions' conflicting content makes them poor evidence for any specific claim.

Where you meet it

In 2006 a team at Johns Hopkins published a double-blind study in which thirty-six volunteers with no prior use received either psilocybin or an active comparator, in a supervised setting, and completed standard mysticism scales.

About two thirds of those receiving psilocybin met criteria for a complete mystical experience. At a fourteen-month follow-up, most rated it among the five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives, comparable to the birth of a child, and reported sustained positive changes in attitude and behaviour confirmed by community observers.

The study reopened a question that had been dormant since Zaehner and Huxley argued about it in the 1950s. If experiences meeting every classical criterion can be occasioned pharmacologically, then either such experiences are not evidence of contact with anything, or the mechanism by which they arise is irrelevant to what they disclose.

Both conclusions have been drawn, by people who agree entirely about the data.

What is actually disputed

Whether mystical experience is evidence.

The argument from religious experience treats the reports as prima facie evidence, on the principle that experiences should be trusted unless there is reason not to. The standard defeater is conflict: the experiences support incompatible doctrines, with theists meeting a personal God and Buddhists finding no self, so they cannot all be veridical as described.

The perennialist reply is that the core is common and the doctrinal content is added; the constructivist reply is that there is no core to separate.

The pharmacological result sharpens rather than settles it. Someone already convinced can say that a chemical opens a door rather than manufacturing a room; someone unconvinced can say that a reliable chemical cause is exactly what a hallucination has. Nothing in the data adjudicates, which is a good illustration of how much of this dispute is carried by prior commitments.

Commonly confused with

  • the occult Mysticism concerns direct contact with ultimate reality. Esoteric and magical traditions are a different subject with a different history.
  • religious feeling Devotional emotion is common and is not what the term picks out. The reports describe a specific structure.

Defined against

  • Reason Whether the highest thing is reached by argument or by something else is the question, and the traditions using this term almost all answer the second

Philosophers

  • Plotinus Union with the One, described from inside
  • Meister Eckhart The godhead beyond God, and detachment
  • Al-Ghazali Certainty found in tasting rather than demonstration
  • William James The four marks, and the psychological study of the reports
  • Shankara Non-dual realisation as knowledge rather than experience

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Maʿrifa c. 1100 · Transcendence c. 260 · Faith c. 1270 · The sacred c. 400 · Knowledge c. 369 BC

The category of mysticism as a cross-cultural kind is largely a nineteenth and twentieth-century construction, and whether the traditions it groups are describing the same thing is the central scholarly dispute about it.