Lifting the Final Veil off Mysticism. I

Science is a powerful tool. Nothing seems to have escaped its probe, even mysticism. I have been trying to probe this powerful religious emotion for a long time, through study and through practice. I believe I am close to the end. But is that so? I turned to another book, one of the best, in my opinion. It is Rational Mysticism (2003) . It has a rather long subtitle: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality and an explanatory line under its formal title: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment. All the magic or buzz words are there: mysticism, spirituality, rationality, science and enlightenment. It is written by John Horgan, who gave us The End of Science (1997) and The Undiscovered Mind (1999).

As Horgan said in his introduction, enlightenment is the telos of the great Eastern religions: Hinduism and Buddhism and has also played not a small role in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All kinds of organizations are now offering courses that promise to deliver nirvana to devotees like Transcendental Meditation, Hare Krishna movements, centres of "holistic learning" like the Omega Institute in New York, Naropa Institute in Colorado and the California Institute for Integral Studies, with courses in Vipassana meditation, shamanic drum beating, tantric yoga, Kabala studies and Sufi dancing etc. whilst others seek mystical insights through ingesting drugs like LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote cactus fruit, ayahuasca etc. .

In this book, Horgan tried to explore the answers to a number of related questions like "what can neuroscience, psychiatry and other related science tell us about the causes of mystical states? Are there any risks in following the mystical path, by meditation or ingesting peyote? What is the link between mysticism, madness and morality? Does belief in mysticism always go hand in hand with belief in parapsychology? What is the nature of the supreme mystical state, sometimes called enlightenment? Will science ever produce a mystical technology powerful enough to deliver enlightenment on demand?" But first, he has to define what he means by the word "mysticism". According to him, the word comes from the Greek word "mu" which means silent or mute and the adjective "mystikos" referred to secrets revealed only those initiated into esoteric sects: mystical knowledge was that which should not be revealed. "Over time, mystical knowledge came to be defined as that which transcends language and so cannot be revealed," he says and then quotes the Tao Te Ching "Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.". In other words, none who talks about mysticism really knows anything. But as he says, some are more qualified to talk about it than others. So in the book, he interviewed a number of people who are supposed to know more about it than the others. Some mystics claim that you cannot comprehend mystical experience unless you have at least one. He agrees, up to a point. But he thinks that Francisco Varela (with J. Hayward, eds.Gentle Bridges: Dialogues Between the Cognitive Sciences and the Buddhist Tradition 1992; with J. Shear, eds. The View from Within: First-Person Methodologies in the Study of Consciousness 1999) is right that to understand the mind, you need both a first person and a third person perspective.

Horgan laments the fact that "there are no clear cut criteria for judging spiritual expertise". He agrees with Howard Gardner, ( Intelligence Reframed 1999) who advocated a multiple-intelligence theory, that reasonable standards exist for evaluating scientific, mathematical, athletic, artistic, literary and musical achievement but there exists no objective measure for the "attainment of a state of spiritual truth" and he thinks that it is the same in the study of mysticism. All he could do, as a second best, is to summarize the views of a number of scientists who have done empirical researches into mystical experiences, whether induced by meditation, prayer, epilepsy, electro-magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes or psylocybin like Andrew Newberg (with Eugene D'Aquli The Mystical Mind 1999 with D' Aquili & Vince Rause  Why God Won't Go Away 2001), Michael Persinger ( Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs 1987), James Austin ( Zen and the Brain 1998) , Franz Vollenweider and the psychologist Susan Blackmore (Beyond the Body, 1992 ; Dying to Live 1993; , In Search of the Light 1996;  The Meme Machine 1999) . He did not ignore the works by psychedelicists like Stanislav Grof (LSD Psychotherapy 1980, Psychology of the Future 2000)  and Terence McKenna ( Food of the Gods 1992) because their contribution to "modern spirituality" have been "surprisingly large".

Horgan agrees with the German psychologist Adolf Dittrich ( who with Claudia Müller-Ebeling : Visionäre Kunst, in: Adolf Dittrich, Albert Hofmann u.a. (Hrsg.): Welten des Bewusstseins (Bd. 1: Ein interdisziplinärer Dialog), Worlds of Consciousness Berlin 1993) who studied altered states of consciousness that such experiences, whether drug induced or not, fall into three "dimensions": 1. what Freud calls "oceanic boundlessness": the classic blissful, unitive experience reported by Richard Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness 1974) and other mystics with a sense of self-transcendence, timelessness and fearlessness and an intuition that all the world's contradictions have been resolved. 2. what Dittrich calls the "dread of ego dissolution" ie. such negative emotions from mild uneasiness to full blown terror and paranoia and 3. what Dittrich calls "visionary restructuration" including such hallucinations ranging from "abstract, kaleidoscopic images to elaborate dreamlike narratives" which Dittrich picturesquely labels respectively "heaven, hell and visions". Personally, Horgan had a drug induced hallucinogen-induced experience in 1981 in which he experienced all three dimensions. He says, " Like Richard Bucke, I saw, I knew, that there is no death, not for me, not for anyone or anything; there is only life, forever and ever. Then the ground of being was yanked from under me. I saw, I knew, that life is ephemeral: death, and nothingness are the only abiding certainties. We are in perpetual free fall, and there is no ground of being, no omnipotent God to catch us.". He has never since stopped brooding over the implications of this experience. He asks a question which all those who at one time or another had had such an experience will also never cease to raise: are all such visions, illusions, generated by overexcited neural circuits?   Houston Smith ( The World's Religions 1991; Cleansing the Doors of Perception 2000 and Why Religion Matters 2001), a mystically inclined philosopher, like some others, has argued that all mystical experiences, despite their diversity and apparent contradictions, all point to the same universal truth about the nature of reality, a truth which is not frightening but comforting, a position known as perennial philosophy. Is he right?