Did you enjoy my last series on the spiritual borrowing of prayer beads? If so, you might be interested in this article series which also falls under the umbrella of transpersonal sociology. However, in this series, I am investigating some of the inherent issues and biases in the current methods of the social scientific study of religion. Do you think that mystical experiences are rare aberrations which diverge from “normal” life? This investigation may surprise you…
Introduction
In the spring of 2018, I taught a religious studies seminar on the mystical experience from a social scientific perspective at Middle Tennessee State University. I had some enthusiastic students sign up for the course; however, I could definitely tell that some of them were a bit disappointed when they discovered that terms like ethnography and phenomenology did not hold quite the “how-to” potential for mystical experience that they desired. Still, they all signed up for my class because they felt this area of interest was often neglected in the academic study of religion. I very much agree. In fact, with a background in both theology and sociology, I still find myself astonished that so little fruitful academic comment and consideration is offered to mystical experience. It seems to me that the principal part of religion should naturally be concerned with a direct encounter with the divine, supernatural, or transcendent in some form, and both the academic disciplines of theology and religious studies have vital interests here.
In the context of the class, my students learned multiple methods and frameworks for sociological research of mystical experience. They conducted interviews and field site visits, while learning all of the ins and outs of statistical methodology, reflexivity, and researcher bias. We also had lively discussions analyzing various accounts of mystical experience past and present, in and out of religious contexts. Suffice it to say, they all showed an abiding interest and curiosity in mystical experience, and they were never at a loss for words so one of the last class meetings of the term surprised me greatly.
In this class session, I posed the question to them of why the field of religious studies is still debating the existence of mystical experience as a discrete category of experience. According to survey data gathered over the course of decades, approximately one of out of every five persons in the United States has had some type of transcendent spiritual experience, and as many as one out of every ten persons[i] has had the “classic” mystical experience that fits the criteria introduced by William James more than a century ago.[ii] To put these numbers into context for my students, I asked them how many of them had been to Wyoming. Of the ten students in class that day, no one had been to that state other than me. So, I asked them why did they not doubt the existence of Wyoming? Why didn’t they doubt my experience or the experiences of Wyoming written by others? After having made my analogical point through these rhetorical questions, I turned back to the issue at hand.
Why are religious studies scholars not giving more emphasis to the meaning that mystical experience offers to groups? What actual utility does mystical experience have for groups and societies? These questions wrinkled several foreheads and raised eyebrows. One or two of my more extroverted students offered some hesitant, indirect explanations. For instance, one proposed, a personal mystical experience can deeply affect a person. That person, in turn, can be inspired to effect change in her or his affinity group, community, or larger society. I admitted this possibility, but I pressed them for more direct connections. After all, if the transcendent can actual interact with humanity, as most religions assert, then shouldn’t that happen in ways which do more than indirectly affect society? My usually gregarious and ingenious students didn’t have an answer for that one, and their lack of response was a silent illustration of why the field of religious studies is still investigating the existence of mystical experience.
Honestly, I think I asked them an unfair question, and the rest of this series is both my apology to them and my explanation of why the question is unfair. It is unfair because the “deck is stacked” in religious studies. Social scientific tools have been developed in order to retrieve and analyze descriptive data, but the making of meaning from that descriptive data depends on one’s metaphysical framework. In many areas of sociological interest, one’s metaphysical framework never becomes an issue. Even in many religious studies’ cases, one can adopt a “methodological atheism” through which he or she can remain neutral to the interpretations of rituals and actions made within a particular group.[iii] With mystical experience, the metaphysical issue simply cannot be ignored.
Mystical experience cannot be separated from one’s metaphysical stance. To approach mystical experience from a methodologically atheist position requires a metaphysical assumption on one’s part which strikes at the heart of the entire issue. Psychological and sociological investigations grapple with this problem. Psychological investigations of mystical experience tend to skirt this issue by focusing on the various factors present in an individual case, but sociology is interested in the group, and religious studies deals with both group and individual. Metaphysics must enter into the equation. Let me explain a bit of what I mean, and to do so, I am going to begin at the beginning of the current metaphysical framework for most of the western world: Aristotle. From these opening remarks, I will transition to a discussion of the metaphysics of Plato and Plotinus, and I will conclude by examining how this shift in metaphysical framework could change the shape of the Wyoming question in my opening anecdote. I assert that the metaphysics of Plotinus provides a needed foundation for interpreting the meaning of mystical experiences for the field of religious studies. To trace the lines of argument for this assertion, I begin with the current metaphysical basis for religious studies: Aristotle.
[i] Jordan Paper, The Mystic Experience: A Descriptive and Comparative Analysis (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 138.
[ii] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: The Modern Library, 1902), 371-372. Succinctly stated, James’ introduced four major criteria for mystical experience: (1) Ineffability – mystical experience defies verbal expression, (2) Noetic quality – mystical experience imparts knowledge, but it is knowledge of a different type than everyday “states of knowledge,” (3) Transiency – mystical experience is usually brief and cannot be sustained indefinitely, and (4) Passivity – mystical experience “happens” to a person.
[iii] Peter Berger, “Sociological and Theological Perspectives,” in Theology and Sociology: A Reader, ed. Robin Gill (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 93-100, at 94-95. This stance of “methodological atheism” can be traced back to the thought of August Comte; see principally Treatise on Sociology: Instituting the Religion of Humanity (multiple editions).