Mysticism About Consciousness? Essay, Research Paper
WHAT DOES MYSTICISM HAVE TO TEACH US ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS?
Revised version of the paper delivered to “Towards a Science of Consciousness 1996 (Tucson II) April 1996
[Draft for Tucson II Conference Proceedings]
Revised version appears in JCS, 5, No.2 (1998), pp. 185-201
Robert K.C. Forman, Program in Religion, Hunter College, CUNY,
695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021, USA. Email: RForman383@aol.com
Introduction: Why Mysticism?
In this article I would like to bring the findings of my somewhat unusual but increasingly accepted field ? mysticism? to the discussion, for I think they may offer some helpful insights about consciousness. Why? When a biologist seeks to understand a complex phenomenon, one key strategy is to look to at it in its simplest form. Probably the most famous is the humble bacterium E. coli. Its simple gene structure has allowed us to understand much of the gene functioning of complex species. Similarly many biologists have turned to the ?memory? of the simple sea slug to understand our own more kaleidoscopic memory. Freud and Durkheim both used totemism, which they construed as thesimplest form of religion, to understand the complexities of religious life.1 The methodological principle is: to understand something complex turn to its simple forms.
Mystical experiences may represent just such a simple form of human consciousness. Usually our minds are an enormously complex stew of thoughts, feelings, sensations, wants, snatches of song, pains, drives, daydreams and, of course, consciousness itself more or less aware of it all. To understand consciousness in itself, the obvious thing would be to clear away as much of this internal detritus and noise as possible. It turns out that mystics seem to be doing precisely that. The technique that most mystics use is some form of meditation or contemplation. These are procedures that, often by recycling a mental subroutine,2 systematically reduce mental activity. During meditation, one begins to slow down the thinking process, and have fewer or less intense thoughts. One?s thoughts become as if more distant, vague, or less preoccupying; one stops paying as much attention to bodily sensations; one has fewer or less intense fantasies and daydreams. Thus by reducing the intensity or compelling quality of outward perception and inward thoughts, one may come to a time of greater stillness. Ultimately one may become utterly silent inside, as though in a gap between thoughts, where one becomes completely perception- and thought-free. One neither thinks nor perceives any mental or sensory content. Yet, despite this suspension of content, one emerges from such events confident that one had remained awake inside, fully conscious. This experience, which has been called the pure consciousness event, or PCE, has been identified in virtually every tradition. Though PCEs typically happen to any single individual only occasionally, they are quite regular for some practitioners.3 The pure consciousness event may be defined as a wakeful but contentless (non-intentional) consciousness.
These PCEs, encounters with consciousness devoid of intentional content, may be just the least complex encounter with awareness per se that we students of consciousness seek. The PCE may serve, in short, as the E coli of consciousness studies.4
But the story does not stop here. Regular and long-term meditation, according to many traditions, leads to advanced experiences, known in general as ?enlightenment?. Their discriminating feature is a deep shift in epistemological structure: the experienced relationship between the self and one?s perceptual objects changes profoundly. In many people this new structure becomes permanent.5
These long-term shifts in epistemological structure often take the form of two quantum leaps in experience; typically they develop sequentially.6 The first is an experience of a permanent interior stillness, even while engaged in thought and activity ? one remains aware of one?s own awareness while simultaneously remaining conscious of thoughts, sensations and actions. Because of its phenomenological dualism ? a heightened cognizance of awareness itself plus a consciousness of thoughts and objects ? I call it the dualistic mystical state (DMS). The second shift is described as a perceived unity of one?s own awareness per se with the objects around one, an immediate sense of a quasi-physical unity between self, objects and other people. States akin to this have been called ?extrovertive-? or sometimes ?nature-? mysticism; but I prefer to call it the unitive mystical state, UMS.7
Like the PCE, these latter two may serve as fertile fields for students of consciousness to plough. To understand them, I want to introduce the idea of the relative intensity of a thought or desire. Some desires have a high relative intensity. Let?s say I am walking across the street when I see a huge truck hurtling at me. Virtually 100% of my attention is taken up with the truck, the fear, and getting out of the way. It is virtually impossible for me to think about anything else at that time. I don?t even consider keeping my suit clean, how my hair might look, the discomfort in my tummy, or the classes I will teach tomorrow. The fear and running are utterly intense, we might say, consuming nearly 100% of my attention.
That evening, I come home starved, and rush to the fridge. I may be civil to my kids and wife, but I have very little patience. My desire for food is very intense, for it preoccupies most of my consciousness, but it consumes less of my attention than did jumping away from the truck.
Some thoughts consume very little of my attention. Driving to work the next day, for example, I might ruminate about my classes, remember the near miss with the truck, half hear the news on the radio, and think about getting that noise in the car fixed ? nearly all at once. None of these thoughts or desires is very intense, for none has a strong emotional cathexis that draws me fully into it. My attention can flow in and out of any of them, or the traffic ahead, effortlessly. In short the intensity of a thought or desire tends to increase the amount of my consciousness that is taken up with that thought or feeling. Conversely, the thought?s intensity tends to lessen when I am able to retain more attention for other issues, and for my wider perspective.
Now, as I understand them, advanced mystical experiences result from the combination of regular PCEs plus a minimization of the relative intensity of emotions and thoughts. That is, over time one decreases the compulsive or intense cathexis of all of one?s desires. The de-intensifying of emotional attachments means that, over the years, one?s attention is progressively available to sense its own quiet interior character more and more fully, until eventually one is able to effortlessly maintain a subtle cognizance of one?s own awareness simultaneously with thinking about and responding to the world: a reduction in the relative intensity of all of one?s thoughts and desires.
This state of being cognizant of one?s own inner awareness while simultaneously maintaining the ability to think and talk about that consciousness offers students of consciousness a unique situation. For these subjects may be both unusually cognizant of features or patterns of their own awareness and also able to describe them to us: a kind of ongoing microscope on human consciousness. In short, while not as phenomenologically simple as PCEs, these experiences may provide us with highly useful reports about the character of human awareness.
Several additional preliminary matters: First, perforce we will be drawing conclusions based on the experiences of a very few people. Most of us haven?t had any experiences like the ones I will describe, and some may sound pretty strange. Yet we often do generalize from the unusual to the general. Just think how much we have concluded about consciousness from a very few: epileptics, people with unusual skull accidents or brain injuries, the man who mistook his wife for a hat, etc. From the pathology of a very few we have learned a great deal about the relationship of one side of the brain to the other, of two kinds of knowing, of information storage and retrieval, of impulse control, etc. Indeed it is common practice to take data about a few unusual individuals and generalize it to the many. Here again we are studying the data of a few. But rather than the pathological, we will be studying people ? Sakyamuni Buddha, Teresa of Avila, Ramana Maharshi, etc. ? who are not ?pathological? but unusually self-actualized.
Should we not be as willing to learn from the experiences of the unusually healthy as we are to learn from the unusually diseased?
The second matter is definitional: What do we mean by mysticism? What is generally known as mysticism is often said to have two strands, which are traditionally distinguished as apophatic and kataphatic mysticism, oriented respectively towards emptying or the imagistically filling. These two are generally described in terms that are without or with sensory language. The psychologist Roland Fischer has distinguished a similar pairing as trophotropic and ergotropic, experiences that phenomenologically involve inactivity or activity. Kataphatic or imagistic mysticism involves hallucinations, visions, auditions or even a sensory-like smell or taste; it thus involves activity and is ergotropic. Apophatic mystical experiences are devoid of such sensory-like content, and are thus trophotropic. When they use non-sensory, non imagistic language,8 authors like Eckhart, Dogen, al-Hallaj, Bernadette Roberts and Shankara are all thus apophatic mystics. Because visions and other ergotropic experiences are not the simple experiences of consciousness that we require, I will focus my attentions exclusively on the quieter apophatic forms.
Finally, I want to emphasize that phenomenology is not science. When we describe these experiences, we do not gain hard scientific proof thereby. There can be many ways to explain an unusual experience: one might say it was the result of what one ate for dinner, a faulty memory, psycho-somatic processes, a quantum microtubule collapse, or an encounter with Ultimate Truth.* Without further argumentation, phenomenology cannot serve as the sole basis for any theory of reality. It may be taken only as a finger, pointing in some direction, rather than conclusive evidence for or against a particular thesis. This is how I see my role in this paper. I will simply describe mystical experiences as accurately as I can, and say where I see their fingers pointing. That is, I will attempt to coax metaphysical hypotheses out of these phenomenological descriptions.
First-person reports, especially those that are about unusual experiences are, of course, notoriously unreliable. When an epileptic says that ?the table seemed wavy?, or when a man asserts that his wife is a ?hat?, these reports are not taken as data about the world, but about their condition.9 One may want to assert that a mystic?s report should be regarded similarly.
But we must be careful here, for first-person reports can also be veridical or even sources of wisdom. For example, in the kingdom of the blind, the ?first-person? report of a sighted fellow that ?the mountain peak near the village is in the shape of five fingers? may be regarded as the rantings of a lunatic or as information about the mountains. Similarly, when Woodward and Bernstein spoke with the Watergate informant ?Deep Throat?, they could have taken his utterances as paranoid ramblings, data about his developing psychosis, or as information about the Nixon administration.
How can we determine which way to regard the unusual first-person reports of the mystics? If we were Woodward and Bernstein, how would we decide? Common sense seems a good place to begin. We might ask, does Deep Throat, or the mystics in our case, seem unconnected or delusional? I believe most of us would say no. In fact many regard Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, the authors of the Upanishads, and others who tell us of such experiences as unusually wise. Certainly they do not seem utterly unhinged, physically ill, etc. Secondly, we might ask, do others in a situation similar to Deep Throat?s describe things similarly? In our case, assuming reasonable cultural differences in language and detail, do mystics from around the world describe things largely similarly? Here again the answer is yes. We shall find a reasonable amount of similarity among their descriptions, a family resemblance, They tend to confirm each others reports. Finally, is there other confirming evidence for our Deep Throats? claims? Here the information is not in: just how consciousness works, relates to the world or the brain, is anything but established.
In sum, it makes sense to regard the mystics? unusual reports about the world as more like those of a Deep Throat than those of an epileptic. But also, again as with Deep Throat, the information we can glean from them is not, by itself, reliable enough to base a theory of consciousness solely on it. It will take the hard-working Woodwards and Bernsteins in the scientific and philosophical trenches to verify or deny the suggestions of our Deep Throats.
Three Mystical Phenomena and their Implications
Pure consciousness events
Let me begin by offering several reports of the first of the mystical phenomena I mentioned above, the pure consciousness event (PCE). First, from Christian mystical literature,10 St. Teresa of Avila writes of what she calls the ?orison of union?:
During the short time the union lasts, she is deprived of every feeling, and even if she would, she could not think of any single thing. . . She is utterly dead to the things of the world . . . I do not even know whether in this state she has enough life left to breathe. It seems to me she has not; or at least that if she does breathe, she is unaware of it. . . The natural action of all her faculties [are suspended]. She neither sees, hears, nor understands (James, 1902/1983, p. 409).11
Several key features of this experience jump out. First, Teresa tells us that one reaches this ?orison of unity? by gradually reducing thought and understanding, eventually becoming ?utterly dead? to things, encountering neither sensation, thought nor perceptions. One becomes as simple as possible. Eventually one stops thinking altogether, not able to ?think of any single thing . . . arresting the use of her understanding . . . utterly dead to the things of the world?. And yet, she clearly implies, one remains awake.12
Meister Eckhart describes something similar as the gezucken, rapture, of St. Paul, his archetype of a transient mystical experience:
. . . the more completely you are able to draw in your powers to a unity and forget all those things and their images which you have absorbed, and the further you can get from creatures and their images, the nearer you are to this and the readier to receive it. If only you could suddenly be unaware of all things, then you could pass into an oblivion of your own body as St Paul did, . . . In this case . . . memory no longer functioned, nor understanding, nor the senses, nor the powers that should function so as to govern and grace the body . . . In this way a man should flee his senses, turn his powers inward and sink into an oblivion of all things and himself (Walshe, 1982, p. 7).
Like St. Teresa, Eckhart specifically asserts the absence of sensory content (?nor the senses?), as well as mental objects (?devoid of? memory, understanding, senses, etc.). One becomes oblivious of one?s ?own body? and ?all things?. In short one becomes ?unaware of all things?, i.e. devoid of all mental and sensory content.
The absence of thought and sensation is repeated in the following passage from the Upanishads when describing the state these early Hindu texts call turiya, the ?fourth?.
Verily when a knower has restrained his mind from the external, and the breathing spirit (prana) has put to rest objects of sense, thereupon let him continue void of conceptions. Since the living individual (jiva) who is named ?breathing spirit? has arisen here from what is not breathing spirit, therefore, verily, let the breathing spirit restrain his breathing spirit in what is called the fourth condition (turiya) ? Maitri Upanishad 6:19 (Hume, 1931, p. 436).
Here again one has ?put to rest objects of sense?, i.e. gradually laid aside all sensations, and continued ?void of conceptions?, i.e. not thinking. And yet the Upanishads are insistent that one remains conscious, indeed becomes nothing but consciousness itself. The consciousness that one reaches in turiya comes to be known in Samkhya philosophy as ?purusha?, often translated as awareness or consciousness itself, that which ?illuminates? or ?witnesses? thoughts, feelings, and actions.13 The purusha or awareness that one reaches during this experience is described as ?sheer contentless presence (sasksitva) . . . that is nonintentional? (Larson, 1979, p. 77).
Here is a report from the present author?s own twenty-eight year practice of neo-Advaitan (Hindu-derived) Transcendental Meditation, which suggests the persistence of consciousness throughout such events.
Sometimes during meditation my thoughts drift away entirely, and I gain a state I would describe as simply being awake. I?m not thinking about anything. I?m not particularly aware of any sensations, I?m not aware of being absorbed in anything in particular, and yet I am quite certain (after the fact) that I haven?t been asleep. During it I am simply awake or simply present.