Peterson, Hasker… Reason and Religious Belief [pp.

22-26]

Is There a Common Core to Religious Experience?

Differences over how to understand religious experience raise a fundamental issue,

which is much disputed. On the one hand, there are those who argue that all religious
experiences have something in common. This is particularly evident, according to some
thinkers, in mystical experiences, which involve an immediate and noninferential
consciousness of some Reality, prior to any subject-object differentiation. The mystic
achieves union with Reality either epistemologically (when there is no experienced
subject-object distinction) or ontologically (when there is no real distinction between
experiencer and object). This experience can be interpreted only later through the use of
rational concepts and categories, but to do so is already to depart from the ineffability of
the original experience.

The view that there is a common core to religious experiences — a core that
transcends the boundaries of different religions, denominations, and cultures—can be
found in writers such as William James (1842—1910) and Walter T. Stace (1886—
1967). Stace is concerned particularly about mystic experiences. His goal is to give a
phenomenologically objective description of the mystic experience. He notes that one
must be careful to distinguish between the experience and the interpretation of the
experience. The interpretation is introduced in order to enable the person to understand
and communicate the experience. Stace wants to ascertain the pure description of the
experience itself. He lists seven distinctive features of the core mystic experience:

1. the Unitary Consciousness; the One, the Void; pure consciousness;

2. nonspatial, nontemporal;
3. sense of objectivity or reality;
4. blessedness, peace, and so forth;
5. feeling of the holy, sacred, or divine;
6. paradoxicality;
7. alleged by mystics to be ineffable.

But, one might ask, does not this very classification invoke interpretation, especially
when Stace speaks about the One or the Void (with capital letters) as fundamental to
this experience? Stace replies that one must distinguish levels of interpretation.

If a mystic speaks of the experience of “an undifferentiated distinctionless unity,” this mere
report br description using only classificatory words may be regarded as a low-level
interpretation. But this is being more precise than is usually necessary, since for most purposes it
is just a description. If a mystic says he experiences a “mystical union with the Creator of the
universe,” this is a high-level interpretation since it includes far more intellectual addition than a
mere descriptive report.
His point is that the above seven characteristics are purely descriptive. Interpretation
enters later, in attempts to identify the One with, for example, the God of Christianity or
Hinduism.

However, the admission that in a basic description there is interpretation, even if

only of a low level, is fatal to the contention that one can discern a cross-cultural,
universal core. This becomes clear when, in making the distinction between extrovertive
and introvertive mystical experiences, Stace suggests that the introvertive kind is a more
complete version of the extrovertive, since “consciousness or mind is a higher category
than life.” To speak of categories and to evaluate them is to introduce interpretation into
the most important of the alleged core elements.

Taking the opposite position, Steven Katz (1944—) argues that there is no
experience that is unmediated by concepts and beliefs. Ah experience is processed
through the beliefs, learned categories, and conceptual framework of the experiencer.
Even self-consciousness — the paradigm of intuitive experience — is a product of
inference. Consequently, religious and cultural beliefs condition religious experience, to
the extent that persons in different religious traditions actually experience differently.
There is not one religious experience, but a plurality of diverse experiences. Katz
appeals to his own Jewish tradition to support his thesis:

Ah these [Jewish] cultural-social beliefs and their attendant practices…

clearly affect the way in which the Jewish mystic views the world, the God who created it, the
way to approach this God, and what to expect when one does finally come to approach this God.
That is to say, the entire life of the Jewish mystic is permeated from childhood up by images,
concepts, symbols, ideological values, and ritual behavior which there is no reason to believe he
leaves behind in his experience. Rather, these images, beliefs, symbols, and rituals define, in
advance, what the experience he wants to have, and which he then does have, will be like.

That is, our prior beliefs, formed by interaction with our religious tradition, shape our
religious experience by preforming the schema in terms of which the experience is
perceived and understood.

As confirmation of this position, note the role of gurus and teachers of the
mystical tradition. The relevant wisdom is closely held by small groups of devotees, led
by a master or teacher who instructs them in a specific method for achieving the desired
goal. Hence, the mystic experience itself is conditioned by the methods and beliefs
instilled by the teacher. The attainment of genuine if not determined, by the master.

How then does one account for the apparently similar descriptions of religious
experience given by Stace? First, Katz holds that the similarity is only apparent.
Although the descriptions of the experiences use the same terminology, there is no
reason to think that the terms have the same meaning in all the reports. That two persons
from different traditions, for example, describe their experience as paradoxical does not
mean that it is paradoxical in the same way, or that the same content stands in the
relationship of paradox. Indeed, the terms paradox and ineffable serve to “cloak the
experience from investigation and to hold mysterious whatever ontological
commitments one has,” rather than to “provide data for comparability.” Second, the
terms used to characterize the experience are too general and vague, so that they fail to
carefully delineate the mystical experiences they purportedly characterize. When James
suggests that every mystical experience is characterized by ineffability and noetic
quality, it leaves open whether the ineffability is the same and whether the noetic
quality has the same content. The truth-claims of Madhyamika Buddhism, with its
emphasis on the emptiness of Reality, differ markedly from the truth-claims of
Christianity about God and his relation to his created world. The Realities in the two
cases cannot be identified.

Henry Suso’s “intoxication with the immeasurable abundance of the Divine

House… entirely lost in God [of Christianity],” the Upanishads “sat [what is]
…is expressed in the word satyam, the Real. It comprises this whole universe: Thou art this
whole universe,” as well as the Buddhist’s “dimension of nothingness,” all can be included under
these broad phenomenological descriptions of “Reality,” yet it is clear that Suso’s Christian God
is not equivalent to the Buddhist’s “nothingness,” and that the experience of entering into the
Divine House is not equivalent to losing oneself in Buddhist “nothingness.” It_becomes apparent
on reflection that different metaphysical entities can be “described” by the same phrases if these
phrases are indefinite enough.

Katz’s analysis has not gone unchallenged. One criticism is that his view cannot
account for some fundamental features of mystical experience. Mystics claim to be able
to achieve a state in which self-awareness and awareness of objects cease. Yogis, for
example, meditate on various things, such as physical objects, invisible things, the self,
and finally consciousness. Gradually they attain to samadhi, a form of inward
concentration in which progressively ah conscious content is removed — consciousness
of ah distinctions between perceptual objects, of inner states such as joy, of oneself as a
distinct being, of objects of meditation as distinct from oneself, or ultimately of
consciousness itself. In the final intuitive state, ah — past, present, and future — are
unified in pure consciousness.

The very attaining of pure consciousness defies Katz’s analysis. To reach

enlightenment, mystics often specify a path or a set of techniques by which they
intentionally “forget” or bracket their previous experiences and categories of
understanding. Yoga, for example, specifies eight methods or types of practice directed
toward the realization of pure consciousness. These include a lifestyle of self-restraint
and abstention (celibacy, no stealing, and no injury), moral observances (practicing
contentment, penance, and study), practice of bodily postures, breath control,
concentration on objects, and meditation. Adherents claim that following such a
discipline ends their automatic perceptual and conceptual responses to what they
experience. Ultimately, the yogi achieves pure consciousness, in which all categories,
ideas, and external input are forgotten.

The methods used, such as concentration for extended periods on a particular

object, or, in the case of some Zen Buddhists, wall meditation, have been duplicated in
the laboratory. Experimentees whose eyes were exposed only to a patternless field (by
taping halves of ping-pong balls over them or by mounting a tiny projector on a contact
lens so that the same object always appears) did not report seeing nothing (which still
involves making conceptual distinctions) but described an end of seeing, “a complete
disappearance of the sense of vision for short periods.”

In short, if forgetting and the hike are possible, and if the mystic can attain
a state of pure consciousness in which there is neither object nor content of
consciousness, then Katz’s thesis must be reconsidered. Since all categories and
experiences are transcended, there is nothing in the higher-stage mystical states to be
conditioned by prior conceptual categories or experiences.

However the issue of a common core to religious experience is resolved, both

views raise a further serious question about religious experience. If Katz is correct that
the diversity of religious experience is not only so great, but conditioned by the prior
beliefs of the experiencer, what does this tell us about what is experienced and the
beliefs founded on such experiences? Can religious experience so conditioned by prior
concepts provide a sound basis for religious beliefs? If the mystic is correct that pure
consciousness provides an exception to this thesis, but if the very exceptions are
contentless states, how can they provide any sound basis for religious beliefs? In short,
should we look to religious experience to justify religious belief?