After I was in grad faculty, an enormous tutorial style was to heap scorn on the concept that mystical expertise could possibly be one thing cross-cultural: every little thing was reducible to social context, and the similarities of expertise didn’t actually matter, as I had as soon as argued myself. However the roots of that concept have been typically extra asserted than argued: the well-known article by Steven Katz, which inaugurated the strategy, didn’t hassle to justify its assumption that “There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences“, assuming maybe that italics and capital letters have been the one assist vital.
A short while in the past I famous how Robert Forman’s assortment of essays illustrate “cool” mystical experiences, the place distinctions of senses and self drop away and the thoughts ceases to fluctuate, in sources as diversified because the Indian Yoga Sūtras, the Ukrainian Hasidic Dov Baer and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. One thing related appears to be occurring within the Sri Lankan systematizer Buddhaghosa and the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which each contain, in Ninan Sensible’s phrases, a “systematic effort to blot out sense notion, recollections, and imaginings of the world of our sensory setting and of corresponding interior states.” And it seems that when your thoughts is now not prejudged to disclaim any cross-cultural similarity, you begin noticing it in a whole lot of different locations.
Eckhart and Baer are comparatively marginal figures inside the histories of Christianity and Judaism. The identical is under no circumstances true of the Zhuangzi, one of many two texts which are all the time known as core to philosophical Daoism. It’s all the time onerous to say something with confidence concerning the Zhuangzi, composite textual content that it’s. However when you’ve observed what number of different contexts cool mystical expertise exhibits up in, then it’s onerous to not be struck by this passage from chapter 6:
“I’m making progress,” mentioned Yen Hui.
“What do you imply?” requested Confucius.
“I’ve forgotten rites and music.”
“Not unhealthy, however you continue to haven’t obtained it.”
Yen Hui noticed Confucius once more on one other day and mentioned, “I’m making progress.”
“What do you imply?”
“I’ve forgotten humaneness and righteousness.”
“Not unhealthy, however you continue to haven’t obtained it.”
Yen Hui noticed Confucius once more on one other day and mentioned, “I’m making progress.”
“What do you imply?”
“I sit and overlook.”
“What do you imply, ‘sit and overlook’?” Confucius requested with shock.
“I slough off my limbs and trunk,” mentioned Yen Hui, “dim my intelligence, depart from my type, depart information behind, and change into similar with the Transformational Thoroughfare. That is what I imply by ‘sit and overlook’.”
“If you’re similar,” mentioned Confucius, “then you don’t have any preferences. If you’re remodeled, then you don’t have any extra constants. It’s you who is actually the worthy one! Please allow me to observe after you.”
This translation is by Victor Mair, a Penn professor recognized for his cranky rants about well-liked misunderstandings of Chinese language characters, so I really feel assured that this can be a critical scholarly translation, not just a few random woolly hippie translating on vibes. And the mind-set described on this translated passage, the place one sits and forgets (zuòwàng 坐忘) in an effort to “dim my intelligence, depart my type, depart information behind”: that positive appears to be like so much like Dov Baer saying one ought to “overlook oneself completely”, like Eckhart saying “a person ought to flee his senses, flip his powers inward and sink into an oblivion of all issues and himself” – just like the “systematic effort to blot out sense notion, recollections, and imaginings of the world of our sensory setting and of corresponding interior states” in Buddhaghosa and the Cloud of Unknowing.
However the place I used to be much more startled to note this type of mystical forgetting is in Śāntideva. In spite of everything, I did my dissertation on the man! But with my grad-school anti-mystical blinkers on, for 20 years I had managed to neglect the importance of Bodhicaryāvatāra verse IX.34:
When neither existents nor nonexistents stand earlier than the thoughts, then, as a result of it has no different vacation spot, then the thoughts, with out objects, turns into tranquil.
The Tibetan historians Butön and Tāranātha had no such neglect. They inform the story of Śāntideva’s first reciting the textual content, and say that when he obtained to this particular verse, he floated into the air and his physique disappeared, the remaining strains recited by a disembodied voice. I don’t consider that description as a historic account, nevertheless it’s a robust indicator that the Tibetans seen this verse as a very highly effective non secular realization.
And the content material of that verse, what constitutes the conclusion, is placing. It’s a few thoughts emptying itself of content material, the place neither existents nor nonexistents stand earlier than it – one may say “leaving information behind”, or “sinking into an oblivion of all issues and himself”. There isn’t a bodily apply of sitting, the way in which there’s in Zhuangzi; the verse is a part of a metaphysical argument, responding to a hypothetical Yogācāra objector. However what seems right here is an deliberately tranquil, objectless mind-set, forsaking distinctions, that positive sounds so much like these described by revered sages in very totally different occasions and locations – whether or not it’s Eckhart’s “oblivion of all issues and himself” or the Yoga Sūtras’ “cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness”.
The comparability right here remains to be in comparatively broad strokes; we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that these experiences are all precisely the identical. Nonetheless, I’m having a tougher and tougher time accepting the conclusion that it’s social development all the way in which down. Individuals in numerous cultures put totally different cultural meanings and values on rainfall and the way in which it makes crops develop, however all internationally they nonetheless know what rain is and the truth that it makes crops develop. And it does appear that in lots of unconnected components of not less than the Previous World, revered sages see {that a} apply of forgetting issues and self – by no matter means – can lead one to a spiritually helpful mind-set.
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