Here is the fifth and final installment in my series on the metaphysical foundation for mystical experiences. In this series, I am investigating some of the inherent issues and biases in the current methods of the social scientific study of religion (i.e., the field of “religious studies”). Do you think that mystical experiences are rare aberrations which diverge from “normal” life? This investigation may surprise you…
Drawing It All Together
Is this, admittedly, complicated scholarly apparatus worth the trouble in the study of mystical experience? Well, to the person who has had the experience, this metaphysical work may perhaps be all unnecessary scaffolding, but if that person wishes to communicate so that others can profit and grow from these experiences, then it is everything! Religious studies founds its methodologies, and particularly its epistemology, on Aristotle’s process of categories working back to substance. That is a wonderful framework for working with matter and utilizing matter to its fullest extent, but it does not have much of an apparatus to discern meaning (Aristotle tends to lean on Plato for that). The Western worldview originally formed around Platonic and Neo-Platonic ways of thinking. Mystical experience of all types fits socially and epistemologically within Plato and, especially, Plotinus. Let’s think of it like this: Social science, specifically religious studies, approaches mystical experience inductively from the direction of categories (quality, quantity, relation, position, and so forth) in order to reveal substance. It leads back to the formless loss of self,[i] but we come to that point, and then it doesn’t quite make sense. Where else do we go? Where else can we go? Have we hit a brick wall in the interpretive process? The problem is the direction. Moving from the mystical experience to “categories” back to the essential “substance” leads to the loss of self. That’s as far as the positive, or kataphatic, part of the process can go. It ends in silence, nothingness, or apophaticism, depending on your terminological preference.
Plotinus’ metaphysics could bridge the gap from social scientific tools for description to the making of meaning in religious studies. Viewed from this angle, mystical experience is the “empirical evidence” of the Soul. The Soul is common to all human experience (on an everyday level as the “yearning for something more,” “self-actualization,” “salvation,” and so forth). The Soul is the “evidence” for the Intellect. The Intellect is the “evidence” of the One. The One is the source of all Being. Yet, the continuum proceeds in the opposite direction from the Aristotelian metaphysics. The progression begins with the One and moves deductively through Intellect, and Soul down to the mystical experience. I am proposing a shared inductive-deductive process. Thus, religious studies can inductively discover that 1 in 5 persons have spiritually transcendent experiences (defined widely), and 1 in 10 have mystical experiences (defined narrowly), and can deductively connect that evidence to a metaphysical model of Forms originating from the One. Then, the discipline can make meaning by moving through the various religious interpretive perspectives to a fuller consideration of the One. As a result, mystic experience will shed greater light on what it means to be human in relation to oneself, in relation to others individually, in relation to larger societal units, and, perhaps, in relation to the other-than-human.
With this new metaphysical foundation in view, let’s hypothetically return to the classroom discussion on the existence of Wyoming. Will the metaphysics of Plotinus allow the necessary basis for interpreting the meaning of mystical experiences, as I originally asserted? Let’s see. When I challenged my students concerning the existence of Wyoming, they could have shifted the discussion away from questions about the empirical existence of Wyoming to what the stories of Wyoming could tell them and larger society about the nature of reality: the breath-taking skies, the rolling hills, the wide lonely spaces with no trace of human civilization. We might have discussed the beauty of nature and its wildness as opposed to its “civilized” cultivation. Discussion could have ensued to the mystical nature of absence and presence as the reason to preserve such spaces in our seemingly shrinking world. Perhaps, our discussion might have even led to a delineation of practical steps of environmental activism for the preservation of Wyoming as nature (or God) “intended.” So, in a few brief steps, building on a foundation of Plato and Plotinus, my students might have not been stumped with questions of existence; they might have left that class full of passion and enthusiasm – fueled by the meaning of Wyoming (or mystical experience) – to go be a force for change in their world.
One can only hope.
[i] Paper, The Mystic Experience, 3-5.