
Experience As Evidence
Experience As Evidence
Image: The Jimi Hendrix Experience
An essay on academic exploration of contemplative states
Are You Experienced? How Can I Tell?
By Daniel Simpson
Like many in the past half-century in the West, I first encountered meditation in a book. Its title seemed to sum up the process: Experience Beyond Thinking.
Experience can sometimes be verified, for example when it relates to occupation. If someone claims to have taught at SOAS, we can check.
Nonetheless, many people have tried, undeterred by what Robert Sharf calls the "logical impossibility" of a first-person account of deep absorption, in which mental processes seem to shut down.
To Huxley and fellow Perennial philosophers, such forms of immersion are encounters with divinity, and thus the core of all religion: awakening to the bliss of pure awareness. However, as Sharf and others argue, scholars "do not have access to mystical experiences per se, but only to texts that purport to describe them, and the perennialists systematically misconstrue these texts" to fit their universalised assumptions.
For over a century, blurring boundaries has been popular. Richard King sees this as part of "the modern privatization of religion", an experiential defence against secular refutation.
Their syncretic approach foreshadowed photo quotes on Facebook, decontextualising insights from the scriptures that interpret them. In Vivekananda's view, studying texts was merely "intellectual opium-eating", notes Anantanand Rambachan.
Vivekananda's remix of Vedanta was couched in Western-friendly terms.
"This is not to deny that veteran Buddhist meditators have 'experiences'," Sharf concedes, "just that the relationship between what they 'experience' and what they say about it is far more tenuous than is sometimes believed."
Related problems apply to adherents of all traditions. Significance is socially constructed in multiple ways, not least in language in our heads. With an echo of Immanuel Kant, Richard Cohen contends we can only perceive phenomena, whereas the "noumena" of things "as they are", untouched by thought, remain elusive.
ALL IN THE MIND?
Such assertions were debated intensely in the 1980s.
Robert Forman led the voices of dissent, advancing a compromise he alludes to in his memoir.
Post-structuralists would find this absurd, because of our consciousness of language, which entraps us in our minds.
Everything changed in a conversation with Ram Dass, the American author of Be Here Now, and in the Sixties a Harvard-based evangelist for psychedelic drugs.
The irony in this admission goes unmentioned. Instead, he explores his reasons for self-doubt. He was expecting more powerful change from "cosmic consciousness", as his guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi called the objective. Straightforward silence seemed too simple by comparison. It offered no "cure for heartaches", or the panic attacks that had plagued him since his youth. "Because it wasn't what I had hoped for," Forman muses, "I missed what it was."
Although Ram Dass's comment ("this is that") recalled the Upanishadic mantra tat tvam asi ("you are that", or every thing is everything), consulting texts for reassurance proved no help. Forman lists mystics from many traditions with whom he compared himself.
As tempting as it may be to deduce this, proof eludes us. Sharf cites historical evidence that Buddhist monks have more often chanted meditational scriptures in search of merit than attempted to embody them.
Uncertainty leaves a vacuum for conjecture. Vedic references to Soma are widely assumed to mean a drug, though no one knows what form this took, or if ancient seers were really high. David Frawley attributes their ecstasy to "the bliss of pure perception," not an external psychotropic.
As Alan Wallace laments, science has yet to make use of introspection.
In the end, neither science nor texts can say much more than stand-up comics. Consider this satire by Bill Hicks,
Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration; that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively; there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.
No words convey experience in its entirety. But academics still need to engage with first-hand evidence. Had the Buddha not spoken of his, I might never have bought a meditation book. In Wallace's opinion, contemplatives ought to join forces with philosophers and scientists, "to take the next step in our spiritual evolution."
Further Reading
Buddhists have engaged with science since Christian missionaries called them backward. Inspired by Western scholars, who saw in "human Buddhism" a psychology "of incontestable value", 19th century modernisers rebranded Buddhism as a science of the mind. In the latest cross-cultural fusion, Tibetan Buddhist meditators are being studied by scientists in the lab, but scans of their brains have yet to yield major breakthroughs. Insights from practice can't be measured on a screen.
Diana St Ruth, Experience Beyond Thinking: A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation (Totnes: Buddhist Publishing Group, 1993). ↩
"Departments," SOAS, University of London, accessed 30 October 2014. ↩
Robert Sharf, "Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience," Numen, 42, no. 3 (1995), p.237. ↩
Robert Sharf, "The Rhetoric of Experience and the Study of Religion," Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7.11-12 (2000), p.277. ↩
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954), p.8. ↩
Sharf, "The Rhetoric of Experience," p.270. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and "The Mystic East" (London: Routledge, 1999), p.12. ↩
Ibid., pp.21-2. ↩
Ibid., pp.156-8. ↩
Anantanand Rambachan, "The Nature and Authority of Scripture: Implications for Hindu-Christian Dialogue," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Vol. 8, Art. 4 (1995), p.23. ↩
Ibid. ↩
King, Orientalism and Religion, p.156. ↩
Sharf, "The Rhetoric of Experience," p.272. ↩
Martin Stuart-Fox, "Jhana and Buddhist Scholasticism," The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1989), pp.79-110. ↩
Sharf, "Buddhist Modernism," p.233. ↩
Ibid., p.268. ↩
Ibid., p.269. ↩
Richard Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment: Buddhism, Religion, Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006). ↩
Ibid., p.11. ↩
King, Orientalism and Religion, p.167. ↩
Ibid., p.169. ↩
Ibid., p.171. ↩
Robert Forman, Enlightenment Ain't What It's Cracked Up To Be: A Journey of Discovery, Snow and Jazz in the Soul (Winchester: O Books, 2011), p.84. ↩
Ibid., p.70. ↩
Harold Coward, "Derrida and Nagarjuna," in Harold Coward, Derrida and Indian Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p.138. ↩
Forman, Enlightenment Ain't, p.70. ↩
Ibid., p.72. ↩
Ibid., pp.72-5. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., pp.56-68. ↩
Sharf, "Buddhist Modernism," pp.240-6. ↩
David Frawley, Wisdom of the Ancient Seers: Mantras of the Rig Veda (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), pp.189-191. ↩
Alan Wallace, Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). ↩
Ibid., p.93. ↩
Ibid., p.124. ↩
Ibid., p.24. ↩
Bill Hicks, "Revelations: Live at the Dominion Theatre, London," YouTube video (1993), accessed 31 October 2014. ↩
Wallace, Mind in the Balance, pp.197-9. ↩