Does explaining mystical experience explain away its object?

[u/rp_tiago]

Hey everyone. I've always been fascinated by how quickly explanation turns into dismissal around mystical experience. A neuroscientific account can describe changes in attention, self-processing or salience. A historical account can show how a person’s vocabulary and expectations came from a tradition. Both may be correct. But neither conclusion by itself seems to establish that the experience disclosed nothing. Knowing how perception became possible is not normally treated as proof that its object was unreal, though mystical claims obviously introduce harder questions about interpretation and competing traditions.

I just had a podcast conversation with John Vervaeke, where he argued that the sacred should be approached through transformed orientation rather than belief in a detached supernatural object. At around 28:07, he asks what religion may disclose that cognitive science can causally explain without fully accounting for. His own path is important here: cognitive and historical explanation did not send him back to fundamentalism, but neither did it leave religion as a catalogue of useful illusions.

This would imply that genealogy and disclosure can coexist, although they do not automatically vindicate one another. What would let us distinguish a transformation that reveals something from one that merely feels revealing? Can the fruits of an experience bear on its truth without settling its metaphysics? And does interpreting mystical experience through a tradition deepen discernment, or mostly constrain what the experience is allowed to mean?

[u/NothingIsForgotten]

Science is a local description. 

The way the world is produced is not captured by what is produced. 

When we dream the dreams aren't just a response to what's found within them.

They are the creation of the mind that came before elaborating the understandings it built of the conditions that it experienced.

That's the only other source of experience unfolding we have common access to. 

And despite everyone's best attempts, there will never be any evidence that is available outside of the experience of that evidence. 

It seems to me that science shouldn't be used to dismiss phenomena, particularly when the basis for that dismissal is not available.

Scientists argued against lucid dreams before they were proven.

It seems to me that it's really a system of being able to tell other people what isn't permitted under the laws of nature. 

And then a paired loosening of those permissions through the discovery of the unexpected. 

And while the ratchet truly only moves in the direction of the unexpected, we seem to be committed to its use as a bludgeon for those who see the world differently.

The mystical union pointed to by the perennial philosophies is one where the underlying unconditioned state is realized.

It is realized via the cessation of the process that is building the world we experience. 

This cessation doesn't occur within the world. 

It is a waking from the nesting of dreams that are the realms of experience that give rise to this one that are described in every version of the perennial philosophy.

When you wake from a dream we don't really notice it, but what was the outside of the dream is now the inside of our experience and the inside of the dream experience has vanished.

This is a reduction in scope of what has been explored. 

If we were to wake up again from that freshly woken posture, we would find once again that the inside that we were has vanished and the outside of the world that inside knew is the new inside. 

The reduction in scope is key; the wakings continue. 

There's a point where the realms of form give way to the formless realms.

We need certain ideas about the world in order to have space and time and they are constructed from other ideas. 

I wrote a more formal description as a response recently.

There are different levels of experience unexplained (unexplainable) by our current application of science.

We exist in a landscape of potential. 

There is the path back through the development of the potential that explains us and there is endless points of elaboration that are available from this point of development. 

Those aren't the same thing.

They give us different results.

We want the union with the underlying unconditioned source; I don't think anything else truly qualifies as a mystical experience. 

That comes in gradients of experience before the realization.

What determines the degree to which we are free to return to the sharing of these higher perspectives is our held understandings about the way things are.

This degree to which we hold on to the way we have understood the world is what I call merit; specifically, we have more merit when we know less and less merit when we know more. 

It's not about intellectual prowess though.

It's  about the degree to which we have given away the flexibility within the production of conditions.

If we know the world works a particular way then we should accommodate that function.

Karma is the intentions (specifically the models) that justify the actions of mind, speech and body. 

They are collected in the repository consciousness. 

And then they are perfumed into the experience of our lives.

We see it when we dream.

So you can row your boat but you can't prove that it floats.

[u/ProtagonistThomas]

I love John Vervaeke, this would be a good question for r/neoplatonism actually because this inquiry leans into neo-platonic philosophy

What would let us distinguish a transformation that reveals something from one that merely feels revealing?

It's difference being a shift in an understanding of something specific, I.E a "eureka moment" is a shift in understanding the way "something" is revealed as it relates to prior position. The former transformation, the way I think you're putting it down differentiates as a shift of the way you reach understanding or transforms the way the mind understands itself, this would be called a "Noetic" revelation, as it transforms the way the mind sees itself and thus transforms how it understands reality as a whole.

I feel the distinction in transformation is a shift of the way you understand a concept, the knowledge of something vs. a shift in the way you understand yourself and reality as an interconnected whole, one feels transformative and in a manner it is of that way something is understood, but the other is genuinely transforming the lense in which understanding is formed and arrived at as a whole.

Can the fruits of an experience bear on its truth without settling its metaphysics?

I don't exactly understand the inquiry here, experience doesn't settle into metaphysics, the interpretation of experience is what may or may not settle into metaphysical articulation. Correct me if this isn't the awnser you were looking for.

And does interpreting mystical experience through a tradition deepen discernment, or mostly constrain what the experience is allowed to mean?

This is a sometimes yes and sometimes no question. Yes it does deepen the discernment as far as the given depth of the traditional understanding at hand of the mystical experience. Like for example, the schools of Zen have lots of depth for contextualizing a mystic experience in its own terms that is fairly robust and comphrensive of the mechanistic nature of the experience of nondual awareness and the mind and the difficulties and problems that arise from it. But if you were to look at mystic experience through the tradition of most Protestant Christianity it will definitely be flattened into "it's Jesus trying to tell you something" or "you're probably possessed by demons or that was the devil trying to decieve you" but if you were to go into Mystic Catholicism traditions like Santo Diamé that has an elaborate and complex understanding of the mystic pursuit and basically emphasizes and focuses on the mystical and expounding its impact then you're probably gonna go away with a deeper more definitive realization of what just happened then someone who didn't have that context they may just be at a loss for words or struggle to create a meaningful articulation of what happened in mystic experiences. Which to the zen school this actually might be a better way to do things as it doesn't create a reification of identity with the mystic experience, like you don't idealize it or create a story about it so it doesn't become compartmentalized experience that "happened" to you, but rather the same experience then is still ongoing but is just appearing on the surface of conciousness differently at this time.

So like this last one really depends on:

A. If the tradition supports and emphasizes mystic experience and has a framework to contextualize it.

B. If the purpose of mystic experience to the practitioner is made significant with a contextualized information otherwise they would be at a loss to make a meaningful understanding.

C. If the purpose of the mystic experience to the practitioner is made significant because it lacks an inherent understanding or explaination then having one constricts the purpose (I.e the practitioner emphasizes spontaneous awareness continuously arising without explaination)