Mysticism and Sense Perception

1973 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Wainwright

In this paper I propose to examine the cognitive status of mystical experience.There are, I think, (at least) three distinct but overlapping sorts of religious experience. (1) In the first place, there are two kinds of mystical experience. The extrovertive or nature mystic (in some sense) identifies himself with a world which is both transfigured and one. The introvertive mystic withdraws from the world and, after stripping the mind of concepts and images, experiences union with something which (in some respects at least) can be described as an undifferentiated unity. Introvertive mysticism is a more important phenomenon than extrovertive mysticism. (2) Numinous experiences are complex experiences involving dread, awe, wonder, and fascination. One (apparently) finds oneself confronted with something which is radically unlike ordinary objects. Before its overwhelming majesty and power, one is nothing but dust and ashes. In contrasting oneself with its uncanny beauty and goodness, one experiences one's own uncleanness and ugliness. (3) The experiences bound up with the devotional life of the ordinary believer (gratitude, love, trust, filial fear, etc.) are also religious in character. Nevertheless these more ordinary experiences should, I think, be distinguished both from numinous experiences and from mystical experiences, for they do not appear to involve the sense of immediate presence which characterises the latter.

Author(s):  
Adam Rybicki

Abstract A space for dialogue between people and the cultures is a focus of this article. To start with, the biblical basis for analysing spiritual experience is presented, followed by the components of Christian spiritual-religious experience. It is also explored whether it is possible to cross-reference the said components with the culture of dialogue. A particular focus is made on the spirituality of encounter and mysticism that leads to a conclusion that a reliable and continuously deepening reflection on Christian spirituality shows its value not only on a “vertical” (upright) plane, i.e. a dialogue with God, but also on a horizontal, flat plane. It shapes the overall attitude of a person, both towards other people and towards themselves, as well as towards the world around them. Certain elements may play a major role in shaping the culture of dialogue between people and the communities of people. These elements are: relational character, desire of getting to know “the other you”, emphasizing the dignity of “the other you”, mutual respect, shared search for and acceptance of the truth and a communal dimension (communion). The ethical aspects of spiritual experience – including a mystical experience – such as conscience, virtue or value, have also been regarded because the ethical elements play a very important role in the dialogue of people and communities.


1998 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEROME GELLMAN

This paper replies to Evan Fales' sociological explanation of mystical experience in two articles in Religious Studies vol. 32 (143–63 and 297–313). In these papers Fales applies the ideas of I. M. Lewis on spirit possession to show how mystical experiences can be accounted for as vehicles for the acquisition of political power and social control. The rebuttal of Fales contains three main elements: (a) the presentation of specific examples of theistic mystical experience from Christianity and Judaism which provide counter-examples to Fales' theory; (b) the presentation of some general objections to its plausibility; and (c) an argument for the conclusion that the burden of proof lies with naturalistic, reductionist explanations of religious experiences rather than with theistic interpretations of those experiences.


1989 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Proudfoot

In a volume of speeches published in 1799 and addressed to those whom he called “the cultured among the despisers of religion,” Friedrich Schleiermacher offered a description of religious experience, doctrine, and practice designed to convince his readers that the conventional pieties they deplored in the churches and synagogues were not genuine religion. Instead, true religion was the sense and taste for the infinite that they themselves were cultivating in poetry, criticism, conversation, and other aesthetic pursuits of their romantic circle. He was especially concerned to allay their fears that religious beliefs might conflict with the growth of knowledge about the world of nature or the mind. “Religion,” he wrote, “leaves you, your physics and … also your psychology untouched.”


Author(s):  
Timothy A. Mahoney

This paper addresses religious epistemology in that it concerns the assessment of the credibility of certain claims arising out of religious experience. Developments this century have made the world’s rich religious heritage accessible to more people than ever. But the conflicting religious claims tend to undermine each religion’s central claim to be a vehicle for opening persons to ultimate reality. One attempt to overcome this problem is provided by "perennial philosophy," which claims that there is a kind of mystical experience common to all religious traditions, an experience which is an immediate contact with an absolute principle. Perennialism has been attacked by "contextualists" such as Steven Katz who argue that particular mystical experiences are so tied to a particular tradition that there are no common mystical experiences across traditions. In turn, Robert Forman and the "decontextualists" have argued that a certain kind of mystical experience and process are found in diverse traditions, thereby supporting one of the key elements of perennialism. I review the contextualist-decontextualist debate and suggest a research project that would pursue the question of whether the common ground of the world’s mystical traditions could be expanded beyond what has been established by the decontextualists. The extension of this common ground would add credibility to the claims arising out of mystical experience.


2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Daniel Clinton

Daniel Clinton, “Line and Lineage: Visual Form in Herman Melville’s Pierre and Timoleon” (pp. 1–29) This essay examines Herman Melville’s reflections on form, line, and perspective in his novel Pierre (1852) and his poems on art and architecture in Timoleon (1891), a late book of verse partly inspired by his tour of the Mediterranean during 1856–57. I argue that Melville arrives at his understanding of literary form through the language of optical perspective, particularly the terms of “foreshortening” and “outline.” I compare Melville’s figurative conception of outline with the artistic theories and practices of William Blake, George Cumberland, John Ruskin, and the artist John Flaxman, whose illustrations of Homer and Dante feature prominently in Pierre. Widely circulated as engravings by Tommaso Piroli and others, Flaxman’s clean-lined drawings fascinate Melville because they emphasize implied narrative rather than optical verisimilitude. Melville responds to a romantic discourse that positions “outline” on the conceptual boundary between sense-perception and free-floating thought, as a mediating term between competing notions of art’s truth. In both his fiction and poetry, Melville’s reflection on the materiality of pictures doubles as a reflection on the materiality of thought. The formal features of visual art suggest the workings of the mind as it flattens unconscious possibilities and disparate truths into a manageable picture of the world.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 151-168
Author(s):  
Ewa Kolbuszewska ◽  
Milan Lesiak

In the article the author seeks to answer the question — suggested by Romantic accounts — about whether the most colourful feature of mountain landscape is its religious nature or whether its most evident characteristics are those that turn it into a land of death. Drawing on biblical arguments, Romantic culture assigned to the mountains attributes of sacred a space inspiring strong religious experiences verging on mystical experiences (Ludwik Zejszner). Thus in the Romantic way of thinking the mountains became witnesses to the creation of the world (Antoni Czajkowski), while the natural landscape began to be viewed as hypostasis of divinity. That is why a homage paid to nature became a religious experience and a tribute to the greatness of God. Hierophanies turning the mountains into a sacred space generated strong religious responses in Romantic subjects; they encouraged prayer and prayerful ritualisation of behaviour. A Romantic wanderer felt a sense of unity with God both on top of a mountain and by the Morskie Oko lake. However, the mountains were also presented many times as a space of death, a fact stemming from the terror of their landscape. Romantic tourists were made aware of this omnipresence of death in the mountains by crosses placed in the mountains as well as graves scattered across them. Victims of the mountains included highlanders, tourists, treasure hunters and poachers. That is why in some literary visions various places in the mountains appeared as a big graveyard (“Czarny Staw as the capital of death”, Łucja Rautenstrauchowa). In the article the author points to various causes of death and characteristic ways of dying in the mountains.


2019 ◽  
pp. 24-37
Author(s):  
Yuriі Boreiko

The article attempts to comprehend the phenomenon of an event in the religious dimension. An event is considered as a phenomenon characterized by a singularity, that is, an individual character of expression, belongs to the sphere of non everyday life, does not coincide with the usual framework of understanding of the world and does not correspond to empirical factual. The need for a more active philosophical and religious discourse of the correlation between everyday and non everyday life in the realm of religion led to the necessity of address to this problem. Thus, the purpose of the article is to find out the ontological status of the event, the religious context of which manifests itself as an opposition to everyday life and leads to a transformation of the established way of life of the believer.          Everyday being is characterized by features of sacredness, demonstrates the attraction to the transcendent. For this reason, the obvious and justified is the combination of the phenomena of everyday empirical world with the values ​​of another dimension of being. The presence of non everyday in everyday life is evidenced, in particular, by elements of cult practice, since they are an expression of sacral time and space, as well as a way of incarnation of eternal values. The sphere of non everyday life includes the relationship between human and God described in the Gospels, prophecies, revelation, and vision as non everyday manifestations of religious experience. Event is the opposition of the world of phenomena to beyond the exquisite world of being, the transformation, which leads to the emergence of new orders and structures. Implementation of the event contradicts the previous ideas, therefore meeting the event with standard reality is accompanied by a transformation of everyday life. Establishing the rootedness of an event into being or its transcendental origin allows us to determine the causes of an event. In a secularized world, human, for the most part, demonstrates his willingness to recognize as significant events, including those in the universe, which correspond to scientific knowledge. This happens even when the fact of the event calls into question the fundamental postulates of science. Given this discovery in science, situations in politics, art, personal life are perceived as large-scale events. Moreover, the moment of meeting with the event can be described, for example, with a poetic language that expresses certain symbols of human existence and appears as a means of objectivizing the event as an unexpected innovation. Instead, the believer perceives events of a supernatural nature as an interference of the otherworldly reality in the usual way of life. Thus, the reception of religious experience is accompanied by the transformation of the individual's everyday life. The basis of the mystical experience of the religious tradition is the experience of meeting with the Divine, which results in a change in the believer's self-consciousness, transformation of its values, senses and meanings. That is, the awareness of an event that does not belong to an established order implies the prospect of new reality emersion, which contradicts previous notions. One of the forms of gaining religious experience is the process of conversion, which results in the transformation of the ideological orientation of a person, which enables the knowledge of their own hidden depths of consciousness. Conversion, the acquisition of grace and faith express the sudden or gradual process by which the individual achieves internal harmony, awareness of his righteousness, a sense of happiness, finds support in believing in the reality of what he has discovered in religious experiences.


Vox Patrum ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 839-851
Author(s):  
Anna Z. Zmorzanka

The opening part of this paper presents the influences of Middle-Platonist philosophy discernible in the ontology presupposed in the Marsanes. These are particularly conspicuous in the hierarchical arrangement of reality. At the summit of the Universe there is Invisible God, second in the hierarchy comes Barbelo, the Mind, complete with the world of intellect (identified with Platonic ideas), then follows the Soul and the world of the sense perception, which is the reflection of ideas. The second part contains a discussion of the fragment NHC X 32, 12 - 33, 6. described in the literature as „Pythagorean”. The fragment contains reference to the two eternal principles: monas and dyas, as well as to the ten cosmogonical principles. In this context the question arises as to the relationship of the cosmogo­ny assumed in this fragment and the one presupposed by the author of the Middle- Platonist exposition. Finally, it is concluded, that the Marsanes cosmogony is typi­cal of its period in being a synthesis comprising themes drawn from ontology (and cosmology) of both: Neopythagoreanism and Middle-Platonism.


Author(s):  
Stephen Kaplan

The title “Scientific Approaches to Mysticism” reveals half the task and belies the other half—namely, which of the sciences and whose mysticism are to be considered. Is it Capra’s tao of physics, Bohm’s holomovement of undivided wholeness, or Saver/Rabin’s limbic correlates of mystical ecstasy? Is it Freud’s psychoanalytic oneness of nursing at the breast, or Goodall’s evolutionary biology of mystical wonder? Numerous mystics have presented us with a cornucopia of mystical experiences, and many sciences have been employed to analyze mysticism. Any effort to create a singular scientific approach to an “imagined singular mysticism” is doomed to vagueness. Specifics matter, and they matter in the scientific approaches to mysticism. A scientific study of mysticism must first clarify what mysticism means—namely, a conscious experience in which one feels that the normal subject-object boundaries manifest in waking consciousness are altered, presenting a state of unity, union, or interrelationship. This definition of mysticism is broad enough to encompass nature mysticism, theistic I–Thou mysticism, and various forms of non-dualistic mysticisms ranging from experiences of the oneness of Being to the awareness of the emptiness of becoming. Each of these broad categories of mysticism must be refined by examining the particular tradition in which it manifests. As such, the scientific study of mysticism cannot assume, for example, that all Christian mystics, proclaiming the ultimacy of a personal communion with the Trinitarian god, are uttering the same thing, nor that non-dualistic mystics from different traditions, such as Christianity and Hinduism, are saying different things. The scientific study of mysticism must immediately confront the threat of reductionism, in which “mystical experience” is reduced to some elemental explanation such as, “it is only one’s brain.” This threat of scientific reductionism has long been elicited by the knowledge, for example, that the intake of drugs is correlated with mystical experience; more recently, this threat of reductionism has been intensified by the knowledge that we have machines that measure the neural patterns associated with individuals having mystical experiences, and we have machines that can allegedly induce mystical experiences. Stepping beyond the psychological, cognitive, and neuropsychological approaches to mysticism, the connections between mystical experience and physics have also been drawn. Relativity and quantum theories have become the hermeneutical tools to analyze and interpret the declarations of all sorts of mystical experiences. These studies of mysticism tend to present parallel explanations of the world. Evolutionary theory and biology also offer different angles of approach to the study of mysticism proposing explanations, for example, which relate mystical experience to the evolutionary chain of being or to techniques for transcending present limitations.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
John A. Jillions

For good or ill, people throughout the world of the 21st century continue to act on perceptions of divine guidance, inspiration, and revelation in personal and public life. Religious experience can lead to both extraordinary lives of human creativity and lives of crippling religious fear and violence. The first-century world of the apostle Paul’s Corinth brought together Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians in vigorous conversation and debate about mystical experience, religion, divination, superstition, providence, the rational mind, discernment, and delusion. Contemporary biblical scholarship has generally been wary of religious experience, but the texts themselves swim in this environment. The introduction argues that religious and biblical scholars as well as those who pursue or question spiritual exploration in the 21st century will benefit from engagement with these first-century debates.


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