I consider the ambition of overcoming opposites, including also a synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity, to be the mythos, spoken or unspoken, of our present day and age.
- physicist & Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli.
Pauli's proposed synthesis will require the development of a "deep science" which embraces both the rational knowledge of scientific empiricism and the inner knowledge of spiritual experience. It will require that, in addition to sensory experience and its empiricism and mental experience and its rationalism, we add spiritual experience and its mysticism (spiritual practice and its experiential data). These contemplative modes of knowing may be able to provide insight into facets of reality which are inaccessible to the measuring apparatus of science. In this light, the transrational faculties support the spiritual science of essence, absolutes, and unity, an essential complement to the material sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) of substance, relativity, and multiplicity.
St. Bonaventure taught that humans possess at least three different modes of knowing: the "eye of the flesh" ( i.e. the physical senses), which disclose the material world; the "eye of the mind" ( i.e. the rational faculty), which discloses the symbolic, conceptual world, and the "eye of contemplation" ( i.e. the spiritual faculty), which discloses the spiritual, transcendental, transpersonal world. These three worlds are not separate- they represent three different aspects of the one cosmos, revealed by different modes of perception (Wilber, 1983; 1998). Similar ideas can be found in virtually all of the major religions and schools of traditional philosophy (Wilber, 1980; Smith, 1976; Schuon, 1976).
This teaching holds that each of these "eyes" discloses its own truths in its own realm, and none of them can be reduced to the others. The physical sciences are grounded in the observations of the "eye of the flesh". Similarly, we can view the "spiritual sciences" - represented by the esoteric/contemplative schools of the major religions - as being grounded in the perceptions of the "eye of contemplation". Ian Barbour (1990), in describing the parallels between the structure of religion and the structure of science, has asserted that both science and religion are grounded in "data" and that both make propositions that can be assessed based on their agreement with the data. "The data for a religious community consist of the distinctive experiences of individuals" (p.36). Barbour labels the most common forms of spiritual experience as "numenous experience of the holy" and the "mystical experience of unity". He describes the latter as "the experience of the unity of all things, found in the depth of the individual soul and in the world of nature. Unity is achieved in the discipline of meditation and is characterized by joy, harmony, serenity, and peace. In its extreme form the unity can be described as selflessness and loss of individuality the joy as bliss or rapture".
For the trained contemplatives, who are the only true experts in these matters, the wisdom of contemplation is viewed "as a direct, nonconceptual intuition that is beyond words, concepts and dualities; hence it is described as transverbal, transrational, and nondual" (Walsh, 1993, p. 223). Apparently, this knowledge is not shaped by language, concepts, cultural "forms of life", etc. because the Real transcends, surrounds, and overflows the categories of thought 1 (Radhakrishnan, 1940, p. 43). The process of interpreting spiritual experiences using concepts and beliefs utilizes the "eye of the mind". Although philosophical systems can and are derived from contemplative knowledge (see the next section), the fundamental transrational insights may be comprehensible only to those who have adequately trained their "eye of contemplation" and hence "cannot be judged by unenlightened people from the worm's-eye view of book learning" (Vimilo, 1974, p. 43).
Increasing numbers of researchers and philosophers (Foreman 1990, 1998, 1999; Andresen & Foreman, 2001) are challenging the prevailing methodologies in the academic study of spirituality - which have centered on linguistic and cultural analysis -and particularly the postmodern and deconstructivist approaches championed by Derrida and others. They have concluded that modern philosophy of mysticism has misrepresented a class of "nondual" mystical experiences by interpreting them using a "Kantian" epistemology derived from studies of ordinary human experience. Perovich (1990) asserts that this philosophy "rests on a mistake, the mistake of assuming that mystical experience is narrowly 'human' experience and, so, is subject to the same treatment as is 'human' experience generally. But the mystics insist that their knowledge is gained as the result of employing faculties which are not the ordinary 'human' ones. At the very least, these claims translate as denials of the validity of 'Kantian' epistemology in the mystical sphere".
It is becoming increasingly clear that, in the realm of mystical experience, the assumption of "epistemological uniformity" - that all human experience is essentially the same - is unwarranted. The foundational assumption of the constructivist view (Katz 1983), i.e. that all states of consciousness are intentional and culturally mediated, appears to be inapplicable to certain classes of spiritual experience, and seems to be refuted by the existence of "pure consciousness events". These events (which have been described independently in the writings of many different cultures throughout recorded history) involve a state of pure consciousness with no content, and hence no mediation and no intentionality. The mystical experience of "knowledge by identity", in which the separation between subject and object of knowledge disappears is erroneously reinterpreted as intentional, mediated experience, in which the subject and object of knowledge are clearly distinct. This distorted view of mystical experience tends to overemphasize cultural relativity and undercuts the objectivity and universality of mystical experience. For this reason it is important that academics who study mystical experience be trained in contemplative practice so that they have some "taste" of the experience that they are studying.
According to contemplatives, spiritual awakening changes our perception of the cosmos by progressively attuning us to more profound levels of understanding (Wilber 1980), or "higher grades of significance" (Schumacher 1977). When we approach the transpersonal disciplines without the requisite contemplative training, the more subtle, profound, state-specific aspects tend to be overlooked. Walsh (1993, p. 225) explains that "when we cannot comprehend the higher grades of significance, we can blithely believe that we have fully understood something whose true significance we have completely missed". E.F. Schumacher (1977, p. 42) describes a hierarchic structure of instruments or faculties by which the human being perceives and gains knowledge of the world. Perceiving the higher levels or grades of significance requires the higher faculties: "if we do not have the requisite organ or instrument, or fail to use it, we are not adequate to this particular part or facet of the world with the result, as far as we are concerned, it simply does not exist." Our instruments of perception must be adequate to the level of significance of the realm of study: "all levels of significance up to the adequate level are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real. When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level (or the grade of significance) of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality" (p. 42).
These transrational modes of knowing may be able to provide insight into facets of reality, or "higher levels of significance", which are inaccessible to the measuring apparatus of science. Some physicists suggest that the all-pervasive wholeness, whose existence can be inferred empirically but which lies completely outside the domain of physics, may be accessible within the realm of human consciousness through "acts of communion with the whole", i.e. using the spiritual faculties (Kafatous & Nadeau, 2000; Wilber, 1984). This realization has fueled a renewed appreciation among scientists for the importance of "transrational" forms of knowledge. Noble laureate Wolfgang Pauli - who was arguably one of the most insightful physicists of this century - has predicted that the development of a "synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity" will prove to be one of the keystone issues of our time (Heisenberg, 1974, p.38; Wilber, 1984).
Pauli's proposed synthesis will require the development of a "deep science" which embraces both the rational knowledge of scientific empiricism and the inner knowledge of spiritual experience. It will require that, in addition to sensory experience and its empiricism and mental experience and its rationalism, we add spiritual experience and its mysticism (spiritual practice and its experiential data). In defense of this controversial third form of empiricism, Sir Arthur Eddington has argued that "those who in the search for truth start from consciousness as a seat of self-knowledge with interests and responsibilities not confined to the material plane are just as much facing the hard facts of experience as those who start from consciousness as a device for discerning pointer readings" (Eddington, 1929; Wilber, 1984).
Ken Wilber has pioneered the development of a generalized "scientific" method that incorporates spiritual practice and its experiential data (Wilber 1983). He asserts that we can accept as valid all knowledge claims that can be verified using the following three-stage method:
Injunction. The "Do this!" strand of knowledge acquisition. In the realm of the tradition sciences, the injunction would be something like, "Attend a major university, earn a Ph.D. in physics, and then perform the following experiment". In the spiritual realm the injunction would be something like, "Take initiation in a school of contemplative spirituality follow the program until one's spiritual faculties awaken, and then make an observation under specified conditions"
Apprehension. This is an immediate experience of data brought forth by the injunction. In the physical sciences this would involve observing some aspect of the physical world with one's physical senses, perhaps augmented by instruments. In the spiritual realm this would involve making observations using the spiritual faculties developed in the previous stage.
Communal confirmation (or rejection). This is a checking of one's results with others who have adequately completed the injunctive and apprehensive strands.
This approach emphasizes the "empirical" grounding of spiritual knowledge in spiritual experience. It also follows that we are not qualified to challenge the truth claims of either science or spirituality until we have completed the injunctive and apprehensive stages of the appropriate validation method. In the words of Evelyn Underhill (1974), a distinguished authority on mysticism, "mystics are the pioneers of the spiritual world, and we have no right to deny validity to their discoveries, merely because we lack the opportunity or the courage necessary to those who would prosecute such explorations for themselves". In this light mysticism reveals itself to be the spiritual science of essence, absolutes, and unity, an essential complement to the material sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) of substance, relativity, and multiplicity.
1 Before one begins a spiritual practice, one's inner state invariably consists of a continuous stream of thoughts, completely enmeshed in the historical/cultural world. . It is natural at this stage to assume that this state of "samsara" is the universal nature of human consciousness. However, as meditative practice deepens, one begins to observe gaps between thoughts. "As meditation slowly moves one away from sensation and thought, the formative role of background and context slowly slips away" (Andresen & Foreman, 2001). Practitioners eventually learn to disidentify with their thoughts. Thoughts drift across the expanse of the mind like clouds across the sky. The significant (transrational) experience is the sky, not the clouds. The Sufis (Inayat Kahn, 1999) say that conceptual knowledge veils transrational knowing- contemplative insight occurs when the clouds part revealing the vast splendor of the sky.