[MD] new blog (mystical experience)

[Steve Peterson]

Hi DMB, Krimel, all


I was actually just working on my next post for my blog on mystical 
experience.

DMB:
> And so what is the mystical experience, exactly? Well, you can't say 
> in advance what it will be like. That's what makes it fresh and 
> original. That's what makes it Dynamic as opposed to static. That's 
> what makes it ineffable and, like mel was saying in connection with 
> Taoism and Judaism, why the divine cannot be named. Enlightenment is 
> different for every person. They are, so to speak, tailor made for 
> each person and so it totally depends on who you are, where you are 
> and when you are. It'll present itself in such a way as to be 
> meaningful for you. So it's not a singular or specific event.  It's 
> more like a category of experience.

Steve:
Sam Harris gave some account of what mystical experiences are like, and 
I've quoted him extensively in my upcoming blog post. I'm hereby 
offering you MOQers an exclusive sneak preview!!!! Okay, it's not that 
exciting, but I think the following addresses some of Krimel's 
questions:


In my last post I only briefly mentioned Harris's final critique about 
atheism's asociation with incredulity or a lack of interest in 
"mystical experience," and I'd like to go into it in detail in this 
post. The following anecdote is an interesting example of the 
phenomenon of "mystical experience" or "selfless consciousness." It 
comes from Sam Harris's article Selfless Consciousness Without Faith:

"I recently spent an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of 
Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his 
most famous sermon. It was an infernally hot day, and the sanctuary was 
crowded with Christian pilgrims from many continents. Some gathered 
silently in the shade, while others staggered in the noonday sun, 
taking photographs.
As I sat and gazed upon the surrounding hills gently sloping to an 
inland sea, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful 
stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being 
a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had 
been—the cloudless sky, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of 
water—but I no longer felt like I was separate from the scene, peering 
out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

The experience lasted just a few moments, but returned many times as I 
gazed out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, 
gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles. If I were a 
Christian, I would undoubtedly interpret this experience in Christian 
terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God, or felt 
the descent of the Holy Spirit. But I am not a Christian.

If I were a Hindu, I might talk about “Brahman,” the eternal Self, of 
which all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. But I 
am not a Hindu. If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the 
"dharmakaya of emptiness" in which all apparent things manifest. But I 
am not a Buddhist.

As someone who is simply making his best effort to be a rational human 
being, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences 
of this sort. The truth is, I experience what I would call the 
“selflessness of consciousness” rather often, wherever I happen to 
meditate—be it in a Buddhist monastery, a Hindu temple, or while having 
my teeth cleaned. Consequently, the fact that I also had this 
experience at a Christian holy site does not lend an ounce of 
credibility to the doctrine of Christianity."


I have presented the above quote to many Christians. I like how it 
begins as a story about a profound experience that a Christian might 
experience in the Holy Land, but turns out to be the account of an 
atheist. Believers often site such experiences as proof of the truth of 
their beliefs, but a believer reading this account generally admits 
that this is a good description of the sort of experience that they may 
have had, and they also must admit that there is no content of the 
experience that could be seen as proof of the truth of any particular 
religion. The fact is that such experiences have been reported across 
time and across cultures and happen for people of every religion and of 
no religion.

Returning to Harris's talk at the Atheist Alliance conference, Harris 
discusses why atheism's denial of such experiences is a problem. He 
begins...

"First, let me describe the general phenomenon I’m referring to. Here’s 
what happens, in the generic case: a person, in whatever culture he 
finds himself, begins to notice that life is difficult. He observes 
that even in the best of times—no one close to him has died, he’s 
healthy, there are no hostile armies massing in the distance, the 
fridge is stocked with beer, the weather is just so—even when things 
are as good as they can be, he notices that at the level of his moment 
to moment experience, at the level of his attention, he is perpetually 
on the move, seeking happiness and finding only temporary relief from 
his search.

We’ve all noticed this. We seek pleasant sights, and sounds, and 
tastes, and sensations, and attitudes. We satisfy our intellectual 
curiosities, and our desire for friendship and romance. We become 
connoisseurs of art and music and film—but our pleasures are, by their 
very nature, fleeting. And we can do nothing more than merely reiterate 
them as often as we are able.
If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of 
accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for about an hour, or 
maybe a day, but then people will begin to ask us “So, what are you 
going to do next? Don’t you have anything else in the pipeline?” Steve 
Jobs releases the iPhone, and I’m sure it wasn’t twenty minutes before 
someone asked, “when are you going to make this thing smaller?” Notice 
that very few people at this juncture, no matter what they’ve 
accomplished, say, “I’m done. I’ve met all my goals. Now I’m just going 
to stay here eat ice cream until I die in front of you.”

Even when everything has gone as well as it can go, the search for 
happiness continues, the effort required to keep doubt and 
dissatisfaction and boredom at bay continues, moment to moment. If 
nothing else, the reality of death and the experience of losing loved 
ones punctures even the most gratifying and well-ordered life.

In this context, certain people have traditionally wondered whether a 
deeper form of well-being exists. Is there, in other words, a form of 
happiness that is not contingent upon our merely reiterating our 
pleasures and successes and avoiding our pains. Is there a form of 
happiness that is not dependent upon having one’s favorite food always 
available to be placed on one’s tongue or having all one’s friends and 
loved ones within arm’s reach, or having good books to read, or having 
something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be 
utterly happy before anything happens, before one’s desires get 
gratified, in spite of life’s inevitable difficulties, in the very 
midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

This question, I think, lies at the periphery of everyone’s 
consciousness. We are all, in some sense, living our answer to it—and 
many of us are living as though the answer is “no.” No, there is 
nothing more profound than repeating one’s pleasures and avoiding one’s 
pains; there is nothing more profound that seeking satisfaction, both 
sensory and intellectual. Many of us seem think that all we can do is 
just keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road.

But certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that there 
is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them are led to 
suspect this by religion—by the claims of people like the Buddha or 
Jesus or some other celebrated religious figures. And such a person may 
begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often called 
“meditation” or “contemplation”—as a means of examining his moment to 
moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of well-being 
is there to be found.

Such a person might even hole himself up in a cave, or in a monastery, 
for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would 
somebody do this? Well, it amounts to a very simple experiment. Here’s 
the logic of it: if there is a form of psychological well-being that 
isn’t contingent upon merely repeating one’s pleasures, then this 
happiness should be available even when all the obvious sources of 
pleasure and satisfaction have been removed. If it exists at all, this 
happiness should be available to a person who has renounced all her 
material possessions, and declined to marry her high school sweetheart, 
and gone off to a cave or to some other spot that would seem profoundly 
uncongenial to the satisfaction of ordinary desires and aspirations.

One clue as to how daunting most people would find such a project is 
the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are 
talking about—is considered a punishment even inside a prison. Even 
when cooped up with homicidal maniacs and rapists, most people still 
prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time 
alone in a box.
And yet, for thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find 
extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast 
stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational 
people, whether we call ourselves “atheists” or not, we have a choice 
to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative 
literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, 
and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even 
normative experiences under the name of “spirituality” and “mysticism” 
for millennia.

Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, 
that there is no question in my mind that people have improved their 
emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical 
intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of 
subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like 
meditation.

Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what 
contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered 
is that there is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the 
next neurotic thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is 
an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we 
are having with ourselves.

Most us think that if a person is walking down the street talking to 
himself—that is, not able to censor himself in front of other 
people—he’s probably mentally ill. But if we talk to ourselves all day 
long silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior 
conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we 
should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is going 
to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what should have 
happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough to just keep this 
conversation private, this is perfectly normal. This is perfectly 
compatible with sanity. Well, this is not what the experience of 
millions of contemplatives suggests.

Of course, I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. There 
is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, 
in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all 
culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis 
of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary 
cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral 
reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself 
out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.

 From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil 
them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric 
disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive 
thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as 
thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person 
breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.

But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you 
can’t borrow someone else’s contemplative tools to test it. The problem 
is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted 
we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own 
contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had 
to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if 
astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn’t make the sky any 
less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more 
difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.

To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your 
own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: 
many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by 
merely thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences 
are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our 
attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our 
identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This 
can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our 
culture knows much about.

One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems 
more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like 
the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many 
atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or 
if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine 
that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with 
which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or 
ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.

As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me 
assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in 
meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in 
silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just 
making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the 
contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he 
experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to 
have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at 
introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the 
plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human 
happiness.

So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I’d 
like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human 
experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of 
people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had 
glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in 
principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these 
experiences often constitute the most important and transformative 
moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are 
possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our 
craziest religious opponents.

My concern is that atheism can easily become the position of not being 
interested in certain possibilities in principle. I don’t know if our 
universe is, as JBS Haldane said, “not only stranger than we suppose, 
but stranger than we can suppose.” But I am sure that it is stranger 
than we, as “atheists,” tend to represent while advocating atheism. As 
“atheists” we give others, and even ourselves, the sense that we are 
well on our way toward purging the universe of mystery. As advocates of 
reason, we know that mystery is going to be with us for a very long 
time. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that mystery is 
ineradicable from our circumstance, because however much we know, it 
seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for 
but which we must rely upon to explain everything else. This may be a 
problem for epistemology but it is not a problem for human life and for 
human solidarity. It does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a 
barrier to human happiness."

Of all the "new atheists," Sam Harris, "The Atheistic Mystic," is of 
greatest interest to me in part because he takes mystical experience 
seriously. Materialists tend to think of religion as the sorts of bad 
explanations for things that we had before we had science, but I think 
that it is rather these sorts of experiences that are the core of 
religion. To misunderstand that point makes it harder to converse 
productively with believers. If we acknowledge mystical experience as 
real, we will be in a better position to argue that beliefs ought to be 
validated by experience rather than taken on faith. If we deny that 
people who claim to have had such experiences really had them, we will 
undercut our argument for empiricism.

As nonbelievers, I think we will be more convincing if we show an 
interest in this sort of experience and how we may be able to transform 
our moment to moment perceptions and become more loving people through 
our use of attention. My experience of organized religion is that it is 
much more concerned with what Moses said when he came down from the 
mountain than in what he may have experienced at the top. This 
"mystical" baby can be saved from the bath water, since it can be 
argued that modern religion may actually pose more of a hinderance than 
an aid to this core experience of selfless consciousness at the root of 
religion.


What do you think? Do you agree that atheism has discounted mystical 
experience in the past and that doing so has worked against us? Can we 
preserve what I've called, the core of religion, as a science of the 
mind? Have you personally made any endeavors into experiencing selfless 
consciousness?