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?
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