Michael,

Can you draw this out for me?

Martin,

ascetical practise purifies the soul and disposes the mind to receive mystical experience.

Or are you asking about something else?

How do you decide between whether an experience is genuinely mystical or induced by weakness from not eating for four days (not being sarcastic)?

That’s an excellent question. I’m not sure I have a good answer.

Mr Method said on the Bring it On thread: How do we know we’re not drunk when we’re sober? How do we know that sobriety is not drunkenness? Perhaps the answer here is similar. Someone who’s ill and hallucinating may mistake his delirium for mystical experience because he doesn’t know the difference. The saint really experiencing God should know the difference and be unable to mistake one for the other. But how can the rest of us judge? Perhaps only by his saintliness.

Is it really necessary to be able to distinguish? who would say God can’t work through hallucinations.

And perhaps one man’s sobriety is another man’s drunkenness; look at the topsy turvy world of Bender, the lovable robot, who out of sorrow ceases his constant drinking and so gets “drunk” and crashes an oil ship into pluto.

I think that it is very important to be able to distinguish a genuine mystical experience from a holy mirage, and that is different from the secondary question of whether God works through hallucinations. The first task is simply in my general line of trying to perceive the world in the most accurate manner I can muster, especially when behavior will be based on that perception. The second task is related to the first, in that it deals with perception itself, but I would be careful to note that I don’t agree that taking a hallucinogen is the preamble to communion with God.

Allow me a revision because as I re-read what I wrote I see a point for misunderstanding. I should not have left ambiguous the question of whether God can work through hallucinations. By definition, hallucinations are perceptions that are imagined and not based in reality. To see a cat that is not there is a hallucination. Communion with God may seem like a hallucination in that it is an experience that may stretch our bodies to perceive in a novel way (such as the experience Michael referenced above), but the important part is that the communication is based in reality and not imaged. For this reason it is not a hallucination.

I leave unaddressed the mental machinery at work in perceptions and hallucinations alike, specifically whether the machinery is the same or different. Given that we (read “we” as: science) know little of such things I think it best to leave it that way.

I agree with you, Mr Gaudinsky. For precisely these reasons the western mystical tradition generally warns against taking any sensible “appearances” too seriously—apparitions, voices, lights, particular strong emotions etc., since they might be tricks either of the mind or of the devil. St John of the Cross for instance is very insistant that real mystical experience is none of these things. It’s a little more difficult in the eastern tradition because they do emphasise a sensible experience as part of authentic mysticism, in the vision of the Taboric Light and so forth.

But in the end isn’t this the same question of how we can be certain about anything? Say I’m certain that I’ve solved a problem in Euclid. My insight into the diagram is so clear and the truth so apparent that I have complete certainty I know the answer. How do I compare this to the false certainty I had when I thought I’d solved a problem until someone pointed out my mistake? Isn’t there a point at which I believe it’s no longer possible that I’m mistaken?

This is a difficult and important question. I think Newman’s Grammar of Assent could help here.

Re: drunkenness, I meant that we know whether we’re drunk or not based on a whole vast system of prior knowledge, self-assurances, contrasts, etc. E.g., I know I’m not drunk because I don’t feel drunk, I don’t remember drinking recently, people aren’t reacting to me as if I were drunk; I can even say that I seem to be thinking clearly. Generally, we know that we’re drunk when we’re drunk, and if one were to black out and wake up still drunk without any memory of having gotten drunk, chances are our first question would be “am I drunk???”

By various accounts (I truthfully don’t know), there are psychedelic drugs that cut out most of these reality touchstones. They don’t massage perception the way alcohol and marijuana do, they create sense-perceptions that are not perceptions. I’ve been told that after a long mushroom trip it can be difficult or impossible to convince yourself that what you experienced during the trip didn’t really happen. And this is when you have the memory of ingesting the mushrooms.

So drunkenness vs. sobriety was supposed to address the question of how you can known whether you can trust your own judgment. We ask the same questions: have I been a good judge of character in the past? Does this judgment feel like other judgments that have turned out to be reliable? Do I have enough information or prior examples to judge well in this case? Am I high?

Judging the effects of exhaustion and fasting on the authenticity of a mystical experience is possibly more difficult than judging the “authenticity” of an acid trip. If someone does acid, you can pretty much certify beforehand that they will hallucinate and have difficulty afterward separating brain-perceptions from ‘real’ perceptions. But the meditator who is using fasting and sleep-deprivation to make himself more ‘present’ has to ask himself whether he’s in a state to judge his own experience, i.e. whether he’s been drinking recently.

Dostoevsky in Brothers K. has the image of the evil hermit priest (I don’t remember his name) who sees devils everywhere. It’s clear that solitary meditation has warped his judgment and perception so much that he’s not qualified to judge his own competence to take action and make pronouncements. But the book seems to believe in certain kinds of mystical experience and meditation. Possibly even Ivan’s hallucinations are an example.

In the past few months, I have often staid up until dawn, though not to keep vigil, and I have always found there is a quiet perfection in the world before it wakes, that I have never seen when I have slept through the night and risen before dawn. In comparing my own non-religious experiences of sleep deprivation to that given by St. Isaac, what I find particularly mystical is when he says “my intellect returned to me, and lo! I saw it was another day.” Whenever I have seen the world about to wake to another day, it has never been another day for me. Without sleeping and waking when the world does, it becomes impossible for me to distinguish one day from any other.

Let’s be clear, he’s saying that he was standing in his cell before sunset and went into a kind of trance and came back to his senses at sunrise.

Missy, it’s true that the world has a quiet perfection before it wakes. It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed up all night, but I remember occasions when I got a rush of clarity and even experienced a sense of profound well-being (a sort of “the world’s really okay” feeling, or an “I think I know what it’s all about” feeling). That feeling might carry me into writing something for an hour or two. Anything beyond that and I would become depressed and useless. There have been other times when I received the thump of the morning newspaper as a bitter reproach and felt a terrible need to escape inside before the daytime people saw me.

I would just like to link to one of my favorite paintings:

http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/figures/st-francis.jpg

they create sense-perceptions that are not perceptions

This is exactly what authentic mystical experience is not supposed to be like. There is either no perceptual content, or it’s not the important part of the experience. Most decent “spiritual” writers are careful to warn that any visions, voices, etc., are much more likely to be tricks or illusions that not.

Dostoevsky in Brothers K. has the image of the evil hermit priest (I don’t remember his name) who sees devils everywhere. It’s clear that solitary meditation has warped his judgment and perception so much that he’s not qualified to judge his own competence to take action and make pronouncements. But the book seems to believe in certain kinds of mystical experience and meditation.

Yes, this provides a useful contrast. I think the comparison with insight is useful. I read an article recently on a philosophy professor who became a more-or-less full-time conspiracy nut uncovering the “truth” about JFK, 9/11, and so on. He’s extremely confident and utterly certain in his conclusions. How to contrast his certainty, which is surely nothing but false opinion, with that of people who reach legitimate historical conclusions? You have to know what knowledge is like before you can contrast it with opinion, just as you have to know what waking is like in order to distinguish it from sleeping, even if you can’t always express just what the difference is.

Let’s be clear, he’s saying that he was standing in his cell before sunset and went into a kind of trance and came back to his senses at sunrise.

Yes, but perhaps more important is the other part, in which he describes staying awake all night, going to sleep, and then waking up refreshed and being in this heightened state all day where “no earthly thoughts of any kind rise up in [his] heart”. This doesn’t sound like a deprivation-induced hallucination.

If someone does acid, you can pretty much certify beforehand that they will hallucinate and have difficulty afterward separating brain-perceptions from ‘real’ perceptions. But the meditator who is using fasting and sleep-deprivation to make himself more ‘present’ has to ask himself whether he’s in a state to judge his own experience, i.e. whether he’s been drinking recently.

This suggests another useful comparison, for earlier in the homily the same saint quoted by St Isaac describes having gone through years of ascetical practise without any heightened experience at all. The practise is a preparation and self-disposition for the experience, but is not understood to be causally related to it. Most authors are clear that if the mystical experience does come it comes from without, and that it is not guaranteed to come at all, even once in a lifetime of ascetic struggle.

Fafnir:

great painting. Thank you.

It seems to me that there is probably very little to distinguish spiritual ecstasy with certain states of madness internally. Someone who is mad and groping for words to express what he is feeling naturally comes out with things like “the Glory of God”: it is the highest thing he can think of, and madness is probably the highest thing he has experienced. Madness does not necessarily involve hallucinations, so that’s not a good point of reference. Externally however, madness is destructive, while spiritual experience (ideally) is not. I was talking to some Buddhists a while ago who were talking about some of their spirtual leaders, and how sometimes they were more “spiritual” when they were mad on the streets, which doesn’t seem right to me. I favor cultivating a less exciting or extreme form of spiritual experience, one less prone to be confused with madness.

I think I agree with Michael and Erika that there is a difference between delusional self-mystification and a more wholesome brand of mystical and spiritual experiences. I of course think that the difference lies in a brain state. Having “no earthly thoughts of any kind rise up in [his] heart” sounds to me like a kind of optimal, sustained state of wholesome activity. It’s interesting when he says: “nor have I need of set rules”; I take it that he’s going about his chores and prayers, and everything is coming to him naturally and without internal complaint. Contrast that with this ridiculous paragraph I found on the GTD blog Lifehacker:

Each night I now script out the first five things I will do when I get to the office. If I don’t have meetings, I run the script. If I do have meetings, I make them part of my script. This creates discipline and helps me follow GTD. It means that I firewall my attention and do not look at email or feeds until a certain time I have it scheduled on my calendar. It’s in the script.

Actually, this is a great contrast. The guy in the quote wishes he had what the saint has, but in order to Get Things Done he’ll settle for a script, which he “compiles” the night before, and “runs” in the morning.

There’s a lot of interest in reproducing optimal brain states like this. Obviously, if a drug company could produce a pill that created instant satori, it would. My guess is that any pill would at best do only half the work. Drugs like Adderol(sp?), which is prescribed for attention disorders but commonly abused (used?) by regular students seem to promote an easy flow of thought, but the effect doesn’t seem to be entirely healthy: thinking is lucid but slightly manic, and the focus is so intense as to be unnerving (I’ve seen some of this myself, and the movie Thumbsucker has a good depiction).

Sorry, kind of rapping. The last thing I want to get in is this, from any editorial on the contemporary ideas about happiness and blessedness in Wired:

In describing optimal experience — the subjective state of happiness he calls flow — the psychiatrist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says it comes down to engaging in activities just beyond our skill level.

This is a pretty cool idea if you think about it, even if it does predictably emphasize function over being (if that makes sense).