Rational Mysticism

Mariner Books

Excerpt

Introduction
Lena"s Feather
My wife, Suzie, is known in our hometown as a nurturer of birds. One
recent spring a neighbor brought her a crow hatchling he had found in the
woods. After failing to find its nest, Suzie decided to raise the crow, which
she named Lena. When she first arrived, Lena had blue eyes, as all fledgling
crows do, and she could barely walk, let alone fly. A cardboard box in the
corner of our living room served as her nest. When Suzie approached with
grape slices, moistened dog food pellets, and live mealworms, Lena flung
her head back and opened her beak wide. Suzie dropped the morsels into
Lena"s pink gullet, and Lena gulped them down.
Lena was soon hopping and flapping around the living room like a
gangly teen, crashing into chairs and windows, poking through our bric-a-
brac. After Suzie took her outside onto our deck, Lena launched herself
onto the roof of the house and into nearby trees. She always returned for
meals, and each night after dinner Suzie brought her inside for the night, until
one evening when Lena vanished into the woods. Suzie was distraught,
fearing that a hawk or an owl would kill the adolescent bird. But when Suzie
went outside at dawn with a plate of worms and grapes, Lena careened out of
the sky and skidded onto the deck, cawing.
That pattern persisted. Lena disappeared at night and returned
every morning for food and companionship. Because I am my family"s
earliest riser, she usually greeted me first. As I sipped coffee in my attic
office, caws approached through the skylight above my desk, followed by
wingbeats and claws scratching shingles. A moment later, Lena peered down
at me through the skylight, cooing. When I went out on the deck later to read
the newspaper, she crouched at my feet and yanked on my shoelaces or
perched on my shoulder and pecked the paper. I pretended to be annoyed,
shooing her away, and to my delight she kept coming back.
Lena loved playing tag with our kids, Mac, who was five then, and
Skye, who was four. As they chased her, she bounded on the ground
before them, occasionally pirouetting behind them and scooting between their
legs, staying just beyond their reach. She was fearless. When Mac and
Skye swooped back and forth on swings, she stood near the low point of
their trajectory and pecked at their rear ends whooshing by. Lena"s first love
was Suzie. When Suzie came outside, Lena would hop on her shoulder and
nestle against her neck, making noises of affection, as did Suzie.
We spent two magical months in this manner, with this wild
creature insinuating herself into our lives. One morning as I sat in my office
staring at my computer, I heard a howl of anguish from outside. I ran into
the back yard and found Suzie sitting on the ground, wailing, with Lena in her
lap. Lena"s glossy black form was limp, her blue eyes dim. Blood oozed
from her beak. She had been playing tag with Mac and Skye. One of them
had collided with Lena, breaking her neck. We buried her on a hillock near
our house. Suzie planted daffodils and tulips over her grave.
At the time, I was in the midst of research for this book. The next
morning, I was to fly to California to take part in a ceremony that called for
ingestion of ayahuasca, a powerful psychedelic substance made from two
Amazonian plants. Ayahuasca is an Indian word often translated as "vine of
the dead." For centuries, shamans in South America have used ayahuasca
to propel themselves into trances, during which they travel to a mystical
underworld and commune with spirits. Ayahuasca triggers violent nausea,
and its visions can be nightmarish. It has nonetheless recently become a
sacrament of sorts for spiritual adventurers around the world.
As I packed for the trip that evening, I felt a melancholy that
seemed out of proportion to Lena"s death, as upsetting as it had been. This
creature"s demise, I realized, reminded me how fragile all our lives are.
Everyone I love—my wife and children—is doomed, and can be taken from
me at any moment. My anticipation of the impending ayahuasca session
began mutating into dread. I feared that the vine of the dead would force me
into a more direct confrontation with death, and I wasn"t sure I felt up to the
challenge. The people supervising the ayahuasca session had asked each
participant to bring a "sacred object," something of personal significance.
So in my knapsack—along with my tape recorder, pens, notebook, and
several books—I put one of Lena"s feathers.

Looking for The Answer

I cannot recall exactly when I first learned about the extraordinary way of
perceiving, knowing, and being called mysticism. Certainly by the early
1970s, when I was in my late teens, the topic was impossible to avoid.
Everyone I knew seemed to be reading Siddhartha, Be Here Now, The
Doors of Perception, The Teachings of Don Juan, and other mystical texts.
Everybody was pursuing mystical epiphanies—satori, kensho, nirvana,
samadhi, the opening of the third eye—through Transcendental Meditation,
kundalini yoga, LSD, or all of the above.
And why not? Spiritual tomes ancient and modern promised that
mysticism is a route not only to ultimate truth—the secret of life, the ground
of being—but also to ultimate consolation. The supreme mystical state,
sometimes called enlightenment, was touted as a kind of loophole or
escape hatch in reality, through which we can wriggle out of our existential
plight and attain a supernatural, even divine, freedom and immortality.
Along with millions of others in my generation, I puzzled over
esoteric mystical books, and I dabbled in yoga, meditation, and
psychedelic drugs. I never dedicated myself to the mystical path, however.
Friends who had done so—typically by joining one of the countless guru-led
groups that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s—seemed to have abandoned
their rationality and autonomy. Also, the insights I gleaned from my own
experiences were too confusing, and sometimes frightening, for me to make
good use of them. At a time when I was trying to make something of
myself, they were a destabilizing influence.
By the early 1980s, I had decided that science represents our
best hope for improving our condition—and for understanding who we are,
where we came from, where we"re going. Some physicists were seeking a
so-called theory of everything, an explanation of the physical universe so
encompassing that it might solve the biggest riddle of all: Why is there
something rather than nothing? Thrilled by science"s ambitions, I became a
science writer, and for more than a decade I wrote articles about particle
physics, cosmology, complexity theory, and other fields that promised
great revelations.
Gradually, I came to the conclusion that science can take us only
so far in our quest for understanding. Science will not reveal "the mind of
God," as the British physicist (and atheist) Stephen Hawking once
promised. Science will never give us The Answer, a theory powerful enough
to dispel all mystery from the universe forever. After all, science itself
imposes limits on what we can learn through rational, empirical inquiry. I
spelled out these conclusions in two books: The End of Science, which
analyzed science as a whole, and The Undiscovered Mind, which focused on
fields that address the human mind.
In both books, I briefly considered whether mystical experiences
might yield insights into reality that can complement or transcend what we
learn through objective investigations. In The End of Science, I alluded to a
drug-induced episode that had been haunting me since 1981. I kept this
section short, because I feared it might repel the scientifically oriented
readers for whom my book was intended. The opposite reaction occurred.
Many readers—including scientists, philosophers, and other supposed
rationalists—wrote to tell me that they found the section on mysticism the
most compelling part of the book. Readers related their own mystical
episodes, some ecstatic, others disturbing. Like me, these readers seemed
to be struggling to reconcile their mystical intuitions with their reason.
That was when I first considered writing a book on mysticism. I
wasn"t sure that the topic would warrant book-length treatment. As recently
as 1990 the psychologist Charles Tart, editor of Altered States of
Consciousness, a collection of scholarly articles on mysticism and other
exotic cognitive conditions, complained that so little research had been
done since his book"s publication in 1969 that it scarcely needed updating.
Attempts to reconcile science and mysticism had apparently not
progressed much beyond crude studies of meditators" brain waves and
claims of vague correspondences between quantum mechanics and Hindu
doctrine.
But I soon found that investigations of mysticism are proceeding
along a broad range of scholarly and scientific fronts. During the 1990s
ordinary consciousness, once considered beneath the notice of respectable
scientists, became a legitimate and increasingly popular object of
investigation. Emboldened by this trend, some scientists have begun
focusing on exotic states of consciousness, including mystical ones.
Researchers are sharing results at conferences such as "Worlds of
Consciousness," held in 1999 in Basel, Switzerland, the birthplace of LSD;
and in books such as The Mystical Mind, Zen and the Brain, and DMT: The
Spirit Molecule.
Their approaches are eclectic. Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at
the University of Pennsylvania, is scanning the brains of meditating
Buddhists and praying nuns to pinpoint the neural correlates of mystical
experience. The Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger tries to induce
religious visions in volunteers by electromagnetically stimulating their brains
with a device called the God machine. The Swiss psychiatrist Franz
Vollenweider has mapped the neural circuitry underlying blissful and horrific
psychedelic trips with positron emission tomography. The findings of
researchers like these are invigorating long-standing debates among
theologians, philosophers, and other scholars about the meaning of
mysticism and its relationship to mainstream science and religion.
This upsurge in scientific and scholarly interest has not brought
about consensus on mystical matters. Quite the contrary. Scholars
disagree about the causes of mystical experiences, the best means of
inducing them, their relation to mental illness and morality, and their
metaphysical significance. Some experts maintain that psychology and even
physics must be completely revamped to account for mysticism"s
supernatural implications. Others believe that mainstream, materialistic
science is quite adequate to explain mystical phenomena. Similarly,
scholars disagree about whether mystical visions affirm or undermine
conventional religious faith.
Eventually I decided that the time was right after all for a book on
mysticism. Most such books, whether written by philosophers of religion,
neurologists, or New Age gurus, hew to a particular theory or theology,
such as Zen Buddhism or psychedelic shamanism or evolutionary
psychology. My goal was to write a book as wide-ranging, up-to-date, and
open-minded as possible. The book would be journalistic, based primarily on
face-to-face interviews with leading theologians, philosophers, psychologists,
psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and other professional ponderers of
mysticism. I would assess their respective findings and conjectures, trying
to determine where they converge or diverge, where they make sense or go
off the deep end. To provide historical context, I would show how recent
mystical studies are both corroborating and advancing beyond inquiries
undertaken in the past by scholars such as William James and Aldous
Huxley. And I would discuss my personal experiences where relevant.

Mysticism"s schisms

Mysticism, the human-potential priestess Jean Houston warned me early
on in this project, begins in mist, has an I in the middle, and ends in schism.
Debate begins with definition. Mysticism is often defined, in a derogatory
sense, as metaphysical obfuscation, or belief in ghosts and other occult
phenomena. William James mentioned these meanings in his classic 1902
work The Varieties of Religious Experience before offering a definition that is
still widely cited. Mysticism, James proposed, begins with an experience
that meets four criteria: It is ineffable—that is, difficult or impossible to
convey in ordinary language. It is noetic, meaning that it seems to reveal
deep, profound truth. It is transient, rarely lasting for more than an hour or
so. And it is a passive state, in which you feel gripped by a force much
greater than yourself. Two qualities that James did not include in his formal
list but mentioned elsewhere are blissfulness and a sense of union with all
things.
In Cosmic Consciousness, published at around the same time as
The Varieties of Religious Experience, the Canadian psychiatrist Richard
Bucke described an experience that met all of James"s criteria. A carriage
was bearing Bucke home from an evening lecture when he was overcome
by "immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an
illumination quite impossible to describe." The experience lasted only a few
moments, but during it Bucke "saw and knew" that "the Cosmos is not dead
matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the
universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things
work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the
world is what we call love and that the happiness of everyone is in the long
run absolutely certain."
But in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James made it clear
that mystical experiences may not be ineffable, transient, passive, blissful,
or unitive. Some mystics describe their supposedly ineffable visions at great
length. They may claim to be gifted not just with transient flashes of insight
but with a permanent shift in vision. They may feel not passive but powerful,
and the power seems to come from inside rather than outside them. And
while some mystics feel a blissful unity with all things, others perceive
absolute reality as terrifyingly alien. James called these visions
"melancholic"or "diabolical.&



Continues...
Excerpted from Rational Mysticismby John Horgan Copyright © 2004 by John Horgan. Excerpted by permission.
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