Is mystical experience authoritative?
Three points: • Absolutely authoritative over the person experiencing the state • There’s no reason why anyone else should believe in it • Appeal to numbers not logically compelling • Classic religious mysticism is a “privileged case”, trainees are pre-selected for fitness • Mysticism as a whole is not at all unanimous… • Can be either ascetic or self-indulgent • Can be either dualistic or monistic • “The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own.” • There also exists: delusional insanity / paranoia, amounting to a sort of “diabolical mysticism”, equally compelling to those who experience it, but pessimistic and unpleasant. • Competes with rationalistic consciousness for authority • “…overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.” • “…there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided
Three points: • Absolutely authoritative over the person experiencing the state • There’s no reason why anyone else should believe in it • Appeal to numbers not logically compelling • Classic religious mysticism is a “privileged case”, trainees are pre-selected for fitness • Mysticism as a whole is not at all unanimous… • Can be either ascetic or self-indulgent • Can be either dualistic or monistic • “The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own.” • There also exists: delusional insanity / paranoia, amounting to a sort of “diabolical mysticism”, equally compelling to those who experience it, but pessimistic and unpleasant.
