Lifting the Veil off Mysticism II

What is really going on when a mystic is undergoing one of his or her mystical experiences and what could have been causing them? According to Burton, mystical religious experiences have traditionally been attributed to either psychological causes ( hysteria, conversion reaction, schizoid personality disorder etc) or spiritual causes (revelation from God or some other higher power or entities). However, scientists are now discovering that mystical experiences may merely be the physiological effect of activating various specific areas of the brain forming part of what has been called "the limbic system", including the oldest regions of our cortex or sub-cortex e.g. the cingulate gyrus, amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus and a number of other basal forebrain structures like the ventral tegmental area (linked to our brain's primary reward system) and the associated areas in our frontal cortex implicated in emotional responses and decision making. These are neuro-physiological explanations. In other words, mystical experiences may well be just certain specific neural and physiological states of our bodies.

According to what neurologist Jeffrey Saver of the UCLA said in 1997, the most compelling explanation for the mystical experiences of St. Paul, Mohammad, Emanuel Swedenborg, Joseph Smith, Margery Kempe, Joan of Arc and St. Teresa is neurological. They may all be victims of epilepsy. Dostoievki is known to be suffering from epilepsy or seizures from abnormal electrical discharges in his left temporal lobe. Dr. Michael Persinger of Toronto, using first electrodes and later magnets to stimulate localized areas of his patients' brains, has found it possible to produce in his subjects physiological and psychological experience of a "sensed presence", "another self" or "oneness with the universe". He made three other findings: 1. those who are brought up as Christians would attribute such a "presence" to Jesus, those with Muslim background would attribute it to Muhammad, each according to their prior religious and cultural background.knowledge  2. Those without religions would not so attribute.3. whether or not they had religious beliefs, they all reported finding such emotions to be joyful, harmonious and deeply significant.

In his book Christian Mysticism (1932), Paul Elmer More proposed that there is a kind of "psychological experience, potential in all men, actually realized in a few, common to all mystics of all lands and times and accountable for the similarity of their reports. But upon that common basis...erecting various superstructures in accordance with their particular tenets of philosophy or religion....their actual experience, at the highest point at least, will be amazingly alike, but their theories in regard to what has happened to them may be radically different" The common "phenomenal contents" of the psychological experience of the Neoplatonists, Vedantists and Christians, consist of being "swallowed up, for the most part, momentarily, in an abysmal sense of absolute unity" but this "ecstasy of unconscious oblivion...is utterly without content and therefore indescribable, incommunicable, ineffable..this ultimate state is variously interpreted in accordance with the particular religious beliefs of the time and place". 

More's theory is developed in the contemporary literature on comparative mysticism by Walter Stace ( Mysticism and Philosophy (60) and The Teaching of the Mystics (60)) and also by Ninian Smart but their views are challenged by R C Zaehner in his Mysticism, Sacred and Profane (61). Zaehner argues that there is a specifically theistic mystical experience described by Christian mystics as the experience of "union with God" which is equivalent to what  Stace calls an "introvertive mystical state".

Both Stace and Smart argue that such an "introvertive mystical state" is described by Christian mystics as "union with God" only because  their experience occurred in a world which is already antecedently culturally Christian. Stace however relies not only upon the mystical experience of Christians but also in part also upon the Mandukya Upanishad which distinguishes between three kinds of consciousness: waking consciousness, dreaming and dreamless sleep: "The Fourth, say the wise,...is not knowledge of the senses, nor is it relative knowledge, nor yet inferential knowledge. Beyond the senses, beyond the understanding, beyond expression, is the Fourth. It is the pure unitary consciousness wherein awareness of the world and of multiplicity is completely obliterated. It is ineffable peace. It is the Supreme Good. It is One without a second. It is the Self." The "Fourth" here is equivalent to Stace's "introvertive mystical experience". Stace says that such an experience is quite "different from our ordinary sensory-intellectual consciousness, involving different kinds of sensations, thoughts or feelings.... the mystical consciousness is destitute of any sensations at all. Nor does it contain any concepts or thoughts. It is not sensory-intellectual consciousness at all. Accordingly, it cannot be described or analyzed in terms of any elements of the sensory- intellectual consciousness with which it is wholly incommensurate."

It is clear that in Stace's view, in a mystical experience, what the mystic has is not consciousness of the world as such because all sensation and thought are excluded. To Stace, natural languages are products of the sensory-intellectual consciousness and can express only its elements or some combination of its elements. Thus natural languages cannot be used to describe mystical consciousness. They are simply not set up for this kind of job. Mystical experiences can only be expressed by a poetic language, a language of suggestive metpahors.What exactly does the mystics experience? Nelson Pike says in his Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (92) that for Stace, "It is the pure unity of the manifold consciousness from which the manifold itself has been obliterated" or "The Self" of the Upanishad, not the normal self understood as a bundle of sensory perceptions, thoughts, emotions of a David Hume. That "Self" can only be inferred as a matter of justified speculation and refers to what Stace calls variously "pure unity" "undifferentiated unity" "oneness" or "the One". "The mind is emptied of sensations, thoughts, feelings etc and what is left is a simple awareness of unity", he says. Stace quotes in that regard Plotinus in Enneads VI, IX and XI: " No doubt we should not speak of seeing, but instead of seen and seer, speaking boldly of simple unity. For in this seeing we neither distinguish nor are there two. The man...is merged with the Supreme, one with it. Only in separation is there duality. This is why the vision baffles the telling; for how can a man bring back tidings of the Supreme as detached when he has seen it as one with himself...Beholder is one with the beheld....he is become unity, having no diversity either in relation to himself or anything else...reason is in abeyance and intellection and even the very self, caught away, God-possessed, in perfect stillness, all the being is calmed...This is the life of the gods, and of god-like and blessed men--liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life of taking no pleasure in the things of the earth--a flight of the alone into the alone". The mystical experience involves what Stace calls " a religious sense of the holy or the divine...what is emphasized is the transcendence of the duality of subject and object, the distinction between the individual self and the One." In Islamic literature on mysticism, a special term is used to describe this phenomenon, the word "fana", which means "passing away" because the soul simply melts down, loses itself and is brought to nothing.

In the mystical experience or mystical consciousness, the mystic is strictly speaking, conscious of "nothing": there is no "what" that is directly experienced. The mystical state is strictly speaking, not an awareness of the Self/The One: in a sense, it is the One because all sense of division is subjectively felt to have disappeared altogether. Meister Eckhart and Jan van Ruysbroeck, two of the most famous Christian mystics, both emphasized the lack of any sensual imagery in the mystical state. Ruysbroeck spoke of "the abysmal absence of image" in that union. He said that the spirit is "undifferentiated and without distinction and feels nothing but unity". He also spoke of "solitude and ignorance". He is not alone. Other Christian mystics made abundant use of such negative metaphors or what Stace calls "silence", "naked", "nakedness", "desert", "emptiness" and "void" etc. 

The mystical state is inherently paradoxical according to Stace in that, as he explains, "although it is completely negative, a mere absence, yet it is also a positive experience; and although it is a consciousness, it is a consciousness which is not a consciousness of any particular existence" and that is the same as saying that the introvertive mystical experience is "both something and nothing".  Therefore when a Christian mystic or for that matter, a Buddhist or a Muslim mystic says that he/she is merely "describing"  his/her mystical experience, he/she is strictly speaking, not describing but "interpreting" what he/she is feeling.
 
Burton  is not surprised by Persinger's finding. William James had already found long ago that mystical states could be simulated by the use of anesthetics like chloroform, ether and nitrous oxide. He cited one such example in which the subject said: "I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of anesthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to return and the new sense of nt relation to God began to fade....Think of it. To have felt purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love and then to find that I had after all had no revelations, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of the brain. Yet, this question remains. Is it possible that the inner sense of reality....was not a delusion, bit am actual experience? Is it possible that I felt what some of the saints have said that they always felt, the undemonstrable but indisputable certainty of God?"

Another of James' subjects who had a "mystical" experience induced by ether reported: "In that moment, the whole of my life passed in before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I understood them. This was what it had all meant, this was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do...I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate.".

What do we find from such descriptions? We have all the elements normally associated with such a "mystical" experience : a sense of absolute purity, tenderness, love, joy, ecstasy, revelation, saints, God, inner certainty, a sense of deep significance or meaning and ineffability. But in such examples, the relevant "mystical" experience was drug or chemically induced, unlike those Dr. Persinger's patients reported, which are electrically or magnetically induced. But whether chemically, electrically or magnetically induced, they show that such experience can in fact be artificially induced and reproduced!

In other experiments, volunteers were intravenously injected with ketamine which is an anesthetic similar to the street drug PCP or angel dust, would sometimes experience a profound clarity of thought, one of whom reported that he felt " a sense of understanding everything, of knowing how the universe works." 

Burton drew attention to the fact that such descriptions also show a remarkable similarity to those who underwent what has been called "near-death experiences" (NDEs) resulting from cardiac arrest or other anesthetic complications. Kenneth Ring ( Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience 1980) and Raymond Moody (Life After Death 1975)  have both done extensive research on such NDEs. Ring describes NDE as " unfolding according to a single pattern almost as though the prospect of death serves to release a stored, common program of feelings, perceptions and experiences" but generally, they may include the some one or more of the following elements: ineffability, feelings of peace and quiet, some noises, a dark tunnel or empty space or nothingness, out of body experience (OBE) of the subject being somewhere at the ceiling looking down at their own body and hearing and seeing how people surrounding them are trying to administer aid, meeting others, the realm of light usually described as golden, brilliant and of ineffable beauty usually depending on the culture identified with God, heaven or other spiritual entities or relatives, often not actually seen but merely sensed to be present, review of life events, the border and coming back, usually involving encountering deceased loved ones . Some researchers like Justine Owen, Emily Cook and Ian Stevenson (Near Death Experience Lancet 337 1991) suggested that the awareness of being close to death may be an important factor in the genesis of NDEs. Most report that they would feel calm, in control or rational. There seems an absence or a slowing or quickening of time and space is generally experience as being either infinite or non-existent. Scientists have now found that lack of adequate brain oxygen characteristically triggers the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate which normally binds to NMDA receptors. Glutamate is neurotoxic and may trigger neuronal death if present in excessive quantities. Burton explains: "To prevent such cell death, the oxygen-deprived brain also release protective chemicals that block the effect of glutamate on NMDA receptors. Ketamine has a similar NMDA receptor-blocking effect. So does MDMA (Ecstasy), another psychoactive drug known to produce feelings of mental clarity. It is now believed that this blocking of the NMDA receptor is responsible for the clinical picture of a near-death experience.". But this is not the only explanation. Many have been proposed including a psychological defense mechanism against one'w own death, hallucinations, involvement of pyshotropic substances (endogenous or exogenous), depersonalisation syndorme, temporal lobe seizure-like activity and hyperactivity of the limbic system. 

Many people who have undergone surgery and whose heart stopped pumping at some stage and who were later revived through receiving measured doses of electric shocks have reported such profound peace and meeting their deceased parents, their departed loved ones or angels, or God or simply an extremely bright light at the end of a tunnel. My now deceased father who underwent a stomach surgery in the mid 1950s and whose heart stopped pumping in the course of the surgery for close to three minutes told me later, when I was still a kid, that during that period, he met his own parents who was beckoning to him from across a river behind which was some incredibly bright light, that he experienced a profound desire to join them and then he went through a dark tunnel to what he believed was hell, where he met Yama,(閻羅王) (the name of the Buddhist dharmapala, a wrathful deity thought to be the defender of the Dharma or the Law) and judge of the dead, who who presides over the Chinese Buddhist Narakas or "Hells" or "Purgatories") who then turned over the pages of huge book and checked the relevant entries at the end of which he told my father that his time was not yet up and sent him back. Now I know this was just a physiological effect of oxygen deprivation! What my father told me then was just a psychological drama invented by his own brain (psyche) to account for his conflicting desires to seek death and to struggle to survive in a critical moment of his life when he was on the verge of death, when he was in that no man's land between life and death. It was a time of great emotional crisis, a battle between man's two greatest instincts, that for life and that for death and eternal peace which  Freud picturequely described via the mythic symbols of the Greek gods of Eros and Thanatos. Given the cultural environment in which my father lived with beliefs in Yama or in Chinese Yim Lau Wong, it is not at all surprising that he framed his own gargantuan battle between his desires for life and his desire for the ultimate peace in terms and in images familiar to him.

Burton himself has carried on a number of studies the experience of "dejà vu" on the brains of the relevant patients by asking them to report what they feel whilst various areas of their cortices, and in particular their temporal lobes are electrically stimulated, the brain itself being insensitive to pain. Temporal lobes are long thought to be associated with complex partial seizures, like those experienced by Dostoievsky. To prevent cultural bias, he has included patients from Canada, France and Japan and found remarkable similarities in their response. According to him, many of the mystical feelings occurred either concomitantly or in rapid succession and which he labeled CS for cortical stimulation, SZ for spontaneous seizure and "what these patients described is not dependent upon any specific antecedent thought, line of reasoning, mood, personality quirk or circumstance. A jolt of electricity is all that is necessary." What he intends to show is the possible origin of our feelings of "familiarity", "realness" "knowing" and to show that what is felt as familiar or real or strange and bizarre are not really "conscious conclusions" and can be "easily elicited without any associated reasoning or conscious thought"

Let us hear what his patients have to say. I quote from his book about experiences of deja vu and feelings of familiarity or strangeness or both strange and familiar as the case may be:.
CS: I have the impression of already having been there, that I had already lived through this.
SZ: It was something that he had heard, felt, and thought in the past...He was unable to describe it.
SZ: She feels as if she has seen something familiar. As she tries to recall what it was, she feels a sense of pleasure
CS: a small feeling like a warning...I was losing touch with reality again.
SZ: ...objects look bizarre...speech, although understood, sounds strange in an indefinable way.
CS: Things are deformed...I am another person and I seem to be somewhere else ..with a feeling of imminent death.
CS: she were falling into another, and fearful world.
CS: alone in another world...fearful
SZ: a very strong memory of a scene that he has already lived through, that nonetheless feels bizarre...It seems to me that I have already lived through the entire situation; with a feeling of strangeness and often of fear.
SZ: Begins with a feeling of fear, then an indefinable internal feeling of strangeness, sometimes associated with the emergence of old or recent memories.
SZ: Begins with a very agreeable esthetic illusion...magnificent, giving..great pleasure. At about the same time, intense thoughts...which he would accept uncritically; it could be a voice, like in a dream---..someone wished him harm, that people are saying bad things about him, but at the same time, he takes pleasure from this.
SZ: Begins with a feeling of discomfort and epigastric constriction; a feeling of strangeness and unreality of the environment, with a vague feeling of dejà vécu; then loss of contact.
SZ: Begins with an indefinable feeling of fear, sometimes associated with an internal whispering voice and then an intensely painful emotional state with a familiar resonance, "like the memory of an emotion."

It is now clear that what we "feel" may have little or no necessary relations with reality or the truth. As I have repeated ad infinitum, a feeling of the strength of one conviction or belief, religious or otherwise, is no guarantee of the strength of the truth value of such  beliefs! Even the strongest mystical feelings are no guarantee of the truth of one's religious belief! We are all experts in fooling ourselves and if we are allowed to, of fooling others without the capacity for any independent critical thinking. Hence the suffering and misery we see around us day in day out!