Hoodoo is correct that it’s not an either/or matter.
A “mystical experience” is usually taken to refer to the attainment of a kind of “oceanic consciousness” – i.e., a sensation of the fundamental interconnectivity of everything in the universe. It isn’t really accurate to call this sensation “true” or “false,” any more than one could say I’m right or wrong to feel cold right now. I feel cold, therefore I feel cold, regardless of what the ambient temperature is.
Does this oceanic sensation point to some objective, usually hidden truth? I don’t know. Does it matter? I don’t think so; it’s the sensation that is significant.
Anything we believe is based upon a continuous experience that has been occuring since the moment of conception, from when we went from being two simple (relatively) beings created by two complex (relatively) beings, a sperm and an egg, to being one being, the fertilized egg inside a mother to being one being with two halves, two cells, to three and four cells, until we get to where we are. It is informed by the experiences that others have had and the experiences that have been passed to them.
Any and all perception comes from this. If anyone claims that their opinion is more objective, then they are at best in denial and at worst a liar. All experience is subjective. This does not mean that there is not an objective reality, only that one’s experience of reality is not the object itself, but the object experiencing itself from a narrow viewpoint.
Einstein, Newton and Darwin were all mystics. If we toss out mysticism we have to toss out three of the most fundamental worldviews that have shaped science in the past few hundred years. Then where does that leave us?
We do not test every theory we accept as valid ourselves. We trust that others have tested those theories. This is an act of faith, and is part of that experience. Anyone that tosses out experiential data tosses out everything, including that which was rigorously tested.
How do you know if there is a balloon in front of you? Because you felt it? How do you know that you felt it? Because someone confirmed it for you? How do you know they confirmed it? How do you know the person who confirmed it exists? Did you manipulate it? If so how do you know you manipulated it? What is a balloon anyway? For that matter what is red? What is solid? What is rubber? What is air?
Everything IS significant, just because people don’t understand the significance doesn’t mean it isn’t. I have had moments where I looked at a table and was just amazed by the whole concept. Look at your table one day, and think about the formation of technology that allowed something such as a table to occur. Think about what genesis has occured to allow us to think a table is mundane. Start with the wheel, and the square, and move from those inventions to the invention of the table’s legs. Think about the idea that we one day decided that having dirt in our food wasn’t ideal. Think about the vast array of different foods that are on your table when you eat. Think about what might have caused a person to decide to eat corn, a potato, a chicken, an orange. Think about the decision to drink an orange rather than eat it. Or what about the invention of cooking? Think about the socialization required to get all those different foods to your table. Think about where each food was indigenous to, and what historical events had to occur in order for you to have sushi one night, curry the next, and Steak another. Imagine the trade of currency that occurred directly between you and the person you bought your food from, then the retailer and their wholesaler, then all of you and the banks, then the federal reserve, and the valuation of money, and the economic policies government’s enact, and the wars that affect the prices, and the cars that delivered them, and the oil that powered those cars. You could think about how you aquired that table, and all the dinners that have been had, was it a gift from your parents? Have you had dinner there with more than one SO? What news did you receive while sitting at that table?
From where I’m sitting, a table is pretty fucking significant.
Those who say don’t know.
Those who know don’t say.
Another one I like:
If you meet a man that doesn’t know, and doesn’t know he doesn’t know, avoid him.
If you meet a man that doesn’t know, and knows he doesn’t know, teach him.
If you meet a man that knows, but doesn’t know that he knows, enlighten him.
If you meet a man that knows, and knows he knows, follow him.
I am saying that it is the beginning of the process of perception for the individual person. All life is capable of perception. I’m not saying it’s perception is concious or unconcious. I’d say that birth is probably when conciousness occurs.
Does your defintion of perception require a brain? The formation of the cells is affected by every factor that goes into their development. When the brain is finally developed it then retroactively experiences everything that has ever happened in it’s development by virtue of the fact that it is experiencing anything at all. Like I said, what defines our perception begins at the moment of conception. I Certainly think that all cellular structures are capable of ‘feeling’ what occurs within them. The ability to process that information not withstanding.
I suppose my definition of perception does require a brain, and that the processing of information is a vital part of that definition. It is not clear to me that "every factor that goes into (my) development " is within the limits of my perception. For example, I would not consider pohtotropism in plants to be perception, just a response to stimuli. Likewise, when the cell divides and divides again, it does so without perceiving it.
When you referred to “anything we believe” I assumed you were postulating a brain.
Do you think belief is possible in the absence of a brain?
To be clear, are you claiming to be able to remember, or to have perceived, (at least in theory) everyhting that has happened to you since conception?
Well, I think that performing magic or seeing into the future can be objectively tested and verified. Just tell me what will happen in a year, we’ll write it down, and we’ll check a year from now if it happened (assuming you have no hand in making it happen)
In general, though, I understand that the mystical experience is subjective, but if we agree that all it does is makes a person understand their world, and not some fundamental truth about the world we all inhabit, then it is of no interest to me.
For example, if someone tells me that they went to New York and saw something amazing happening, then that is interesting. If they tell me they saw a dream about going to New York and saw something amazing, then that is not interesting.
Other peoples’ dreams are not interesting to anyone but the person who had the dream.
So, if the mystical experience only modifies how someone views the world, and does not actually reflect what the Ultimate Reality is, then it is as uninteresting to me as someone’s dreams.
However, if everyone who has a mystical experience describes their experience in very similar ways across millenia and across continents, then that is interesting, because it means that either they are actually connecting to “The Truth”, or our brain is just wired to give the same exact experience to anyone going through the rituals/methods that bring about a mystical experience.
If everyone in the room is feeling warm, and you are feeling cold, then it can be said that while, yes, you are feeling cold (and that matters to you), what people can deduce is that the room is in fact warm and there is probably something wrong with you (you’re getting sick or something). So, your feeling cold is not “false”, but if you deduce from it that the temperature in the room is low, then that is false.
If I provide people with a method by which, after going through the various steps of the method, makes you view the people in the room as having alien faces, and presumably you feel these are the “real” faces of the people in the room, and what we see in our normal state are just “masks” that people wear, and if everyone who went through this method experienced exactly the same thing, don’t you think people would start to wonder: “Do we really all have alien faces, or is this experience just a hallucination?”
Could you just say “Does it matter? I don’t think so; it’s the sensation that is significant.” ?
I don’t think so. Because if the sensation does not refer to something real, and it’s just a glitch in our brain, then it is a cool effect to experience, but nothing very interesting.
Well, I do not think I can remember what happened then in the way we normally think of memory, but in my unconcious memory most definitely as it is the origin of all subsequent experiences. So the reactions to it contain the memory even if I cannot summon it. So perhaps the formation of the brain is the formation of conciousness, but I believe every cell has the ability to feel stimuli, and that the nerves are the central network that carry that stimuli to the interpretation center in the brain. I also don’t believe that the brain is the seat of conciousness, the entire body is the mind, and via it’s perception the entire world.
As mysticism deals with the inherent universal connectivity of things, it cannot be otherwise, because anything that exists in a bubble seperate from the bubble within which you exist, is unknowable because it cannot be experienced. If it can be experienced then it wasn’t ever seperate to begin with and only APPEARED seperate. So you are connected to everything in the universe, even if it is through many intervening layers.
I like to think of humans as cells within the corpus that is the Earth. The entire Earth is an organism, and it is a part of the conciousness that includes all of the stars in the sky. A micro-macro reflection and all that.
Polerius: Warm and Cold are relative terms. I can generally handle any temperature above the freezing point of water. Some people get cold at 60 degrees F. Other people can handle temperatures below the freezing point. There is no objective determination for “cold”. It is cold if someone says it’s cold, but just because someone says it’s cold doesn’t mean it’s below the freezing point of water.
In my opinion it is important not to confuse one’s inability to connect the dots with the dots being unconnected. I find that I generally will just accept what people say if I have no reason to doubt them, and then I will wait and find out whether or not it is true. More often than not I find a nugget of truth there that is like a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle, even if I end up shelving the rest waiting for it to become relevant later. However, every experience is valid, every experience is meaningful, the mystical experience for me is about finding that meaning and living in meaning always.
As has been pointed out, “hot” and “cold” are relative terms; if I’m cold while the person sitting next to me is hot, then the room is both cold and hot, depending upon one’s frame of reference. Guessing at what a thermometer would say is not what I was talking about.
The sensation (like all sensations) is related both to the real world and the inner workings of the brain (or mind, if you prefer). It’s a different way of perceiving the universe – as I’ve suggested, I don’t think it’s either true or false.
Let me try to explain. What follows is merely my understanding of the phenomenom, based on a small amount of reading and a very small pool of experience. Since the nature of the thing is so subjective, my description will no doubt be more or less inadequate, and others’ thoughts on the matter will surely differ from mine in some ways. . .
There are certain ways in which everything in the universe is interconnected, and there are other ways in which everything is separate. I think that the ways in which things are separate are, on balance, much more readily apparent to us.
For example, “I” am here looking at the computer monitor. It is several inches away from the nearest parts of my body. I cannot feel the book resting on top of it, nor can I move the monitor by a pure act of will as I could move a part of my body. In these and other ways, “it” is separate from “I,” and it makes sense to speak of it as such.
But the above doesn’t fully describe my relationship with the monitor. I can affect the monitor in countless ways with a slightly different kind of willful act. More importantly, the monitor (i.e. the computer, the modem, the internet, the people uploading writing to said internet, etc.) has a definite but somewhat more subtle effect on me. I cannot describe what “I” am doing (in other words, who I am at this very moment) without referring to my environment, which in this case directly involves the monitor. I am typing and looking and thinking right now, but all of that is dependent on the monitor. Later, I will do the dishes, but I will be remembering when I was typing and looking and thinking; I will be a different person for having interacted with the monitor like this, just as I would be a different person if “I” had to interact with a sudden chemical imbalance in my brain. In this way, the monitor is no less “me” than the chemical imbalance – that one is contained within my skin while the other is not seems an arbitrary distinction for philosophical purposes.
Most people do not routinely think of the things around them as being a part of them in this way because it serves little practical value. As a result, most people habitually disregard this kind of interconnectivity, considering it insignificant and/or illusory. Even now, I can reason out the way in which my monitor is a part of me, but I don’t know it like I know that my hands and my vision are parts of me. During a mystical experience, however, I would know it in that way, intuitively.
Does this make sense? Can you see what I mean when I say that the mystical experience is neither “real” nor “hallucinatory” (or, just as accurately, that it’s both)?
Very much not what I was talking about. But I think you already knew that…
Define “fundamental truth”. It doesn’t sound like anything other than maybe theoretical particle physics should interest you. Because I don’t think there are nearly as many truths that are “fundamental” as you do.
Is this what you meant by fundamental truth? In that case, how many people have to believe something for it to be true? How close do their stories have to be to be “very similar”? What happens when 100 million people have a mystical experience that says “X” and 101 million have a mystical experience that says “not X”?
I’m not trying to be a hardass here, and frankly I’m pretty much a science-oriented person. Faith isn’t really part of my vocabulary. But it seems that you’re only interested in understanding mysticism through the lens of science, and that’s a pre-determined understanding you’re not going to be satisfied with.
I’ve had mystical experiences which started out like the closing sequence from 2001: A Space Odessey, but then turned darker, with snakes and spiders and bats and a dragon’s head which swallowed me–repeatedly. There were other demons and gargoyles and they’re like leering and snickering. I got the feeling I was being ‘tempted’ (to sell my soul, maybe?), but then I thought of Jesus and the scene changed. A city of light descended like the mothership in Close Encounters and I found myself kneeling before the Crucifixion, with a light shining on Jesus from above. I felt that I wanted to emulate of follow him, then suddenly I was on the cross, and I realized that I had to sincerely agree that I’d be willing to be crucified too. Then I was back on the ground and the light became brighter and became a tunnel of light, up which I travelled.
Whew! That experience was so vivid and uplifting I felt as if I had been born again.