The Problem of Spiritual ExperienceThe article is difficult to excerpt and is worth reading in full, but here are a few passages:
Is Mysticism in the Mind of the Beholder?
By Jay Michaelson
I’ve been thinking about these questions for quite a while. In college and grad school, I read hundreds of testimonies, tracts and accounts of mystic quests; accounts of visionary ascents, ecstatic unions and divine theophanies. Eventually, I moved beyond theory to try contemplative practice for myself.Again, read it all. For scholars studying ancient mysticism, the experience of the mystics is a black box. The experiences of modern mystics and intermediaries has the potential to give a peek into that black box and are worth listening to. Some related thoughts are here, here, and here.
What can I report? I can say, in my own limited experience, that if you do what some mystics and contemplatives say, you can experience the results they promise: dissolving of the sense of self; rapture in concentrated joy; feelings of immense bliss; and, for religious souls, a certainty that one is held and loved and engulfed by the Divine. And I think it is worth the effort.
Moreover, there is a sense of “presence” in these experiences that is more than a sensation of having one’s mind altered. Particularly in meditation, the mind feels perfectly clear, not swooning or drunken or seen through a soft cinematic lens. Yet with that clarity, a great love arises without any prodding or effort, and there is often an obvious certainty that the love is not just a personal wiggling of neurons but some openness to how things actually are. That’s the feeling, anyway.
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Well, I was trained to be a skeptic. The process of education is fundamentally about acquiring the cognitive skills of doubt, especially in volatile contexts such as religion, and learning to take apart assumptions more critically and carefully. So I think it’s important, and possible, to be analytically rigorous about spiritual experience. Here are some ways to do it.
First, it is helpful to distinguish what we know from what we don’t. At the very least, since I have experienced what mystics have described, by following their recommendations, that means that if I’m deluded, generations of mystics are as well. It’s not just me, and it’s not new; it’s ancient, widespread and revered. Moreover, the mystics’ testimony is “expert” testimony. Contemplatives are precisely the people who have devoted the most attention to the mind and the spirit. I wonder what my Seder interlocutor, a dentist for 30 years, would’ve said if I had doubted the foundations of modern dentistry. Who are you inclined to believe more — the doubter who has never explored these pathways or millions of experts who spent their lives doing so?
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A second useful analytical tool is to tease apart experience from interpretation. “I felt a great love” could be interpreted as “I felt the love of Hashem” or “I felt the love of Christ” — or just “I felt a great love.” And that depends not on the phenomenology of the experience but the conceptual frame in which it is understood. So as soon as one moves from experience to concepts, one is no longer entitled to the certainty of one’s spiritual perception.
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And, finally, valuing spiritual experience without determining a set interpretive frame diminishes the allure of particularism. If we suppose that spirituality can prove the mythic assertions of the Bible, we are mistaken. Indeed, the universality of mystical experience is why contemplatives tend more to be universalists than do non-contemplatives. Though there may be phenomenological differences in different spiritual experiences, mysticism makes plain that, if religion is like a finger pointing to the moon, you can see the moon with any number of pointers, even those a particular tradition or text wants to suppress.
UPDATE: Last link now corrected!