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(perhaps purely affective) experience, rather than being directly aware of supreme reality. By and large, only Christians report experiences of Christ, only Hindus of Vishnu, and only Buddhists of nirv???a. Nevertheless, the charge is a serious oversimplification. There are many conversions on the basis of an alleged experience of God. In these cases, subjects do not suppose themselves to be aware of what they were antecedently expecting; quite the contrary. To be sure, one cannot report what one was aware of except by using concepts one has (what else?). But

this is as true of sense perception as of mystical perception. When I report what I saw from the train window, I use my conceptual repertoire; I say that I saw houses, trees, a river, and so on. Sense perception and mystical perception would not seem to differ in this respect.

A third reason for partiality is the supposition that mystical experience can be adequately explained in purely naturalistic terms, and that this fact shows it not to constitute an experience of a supernatural reality (see Mackie 1982). It is a basic principle of perception that we cannot be genuinely perceiving an entity that does not make a significant causal contribution to the experience involved. If a tree on the other side of a high stone wall plays no role in eliciting my present visual experience, then I cannot be seeing that tree, whatever my experience is like. But

if the causes of a religious experience are purely this-worldly, then God plays no role in producing it. Hence I am not really perceiving God in that experience, however it might seem.

There are a number of points the defence might make. First, the claim to an adequate naturalistic causal

explanation can be challenged. We are certainly not in possession of any such explanation. At most there are

programmatic suggestions - from psychoanalysis, social psychology, and other quarters - as to the general form

such an explanation might take. Second, the causal requirement for genuine perception might be challenged,

though not with much plausibility. The most impressive defence would be the following. A consideration of sense

perception shows that even there the perceived need not be among the proximate causes of the experience.

The immediate causes of a sense experience are all within the subject’s brain, which is not perceived. When the

causal requirement is satisfied in sense perception, it is by the perceived ’s figuring further back along the

causal route leading to the experience. Hence, even if the immediate causes of a mystical experience are all

natural, that leaves open the possibility that God figures among the more remote causes of the experience, and in

such a way as to qualify as what is perceived. Hence a proximate naturalistic explanation of mystical experience

poses no threat to the veridicality of (some) mystical perception.

A fourth important difference between sensory and mystical perception is that there are effective tests for accuracy

in the case of the former but not the latter. When someone claims to have seen something - for example, an

aeroplane overhead - there are procedures that can yield a conclusive verdict on that claim. We can look into

whether suitably qualified observers saw an aeroplane, and check appropriate sources to find whether there are any

records of an aeroplane being there at that time. But nothing like this is available for mystical perception. There

are checks that are commonly applied in established mystical communities, such as conformity with the

background system of religious doctrine, and conducivity to spiritual development and purity of life. But they are

far from yielding comparable results. Moreover, there is nothing like the check of other observers we have for

sense perceptual reports. If I claim to have been aware of God’s sustaining me in being, there are no conditionssuch that if someone else who satisfies those conditions is not (at that time or any time) aware of being sustained in

being by God, I will take that as showing that I was mistaken. And the argument of the critic is that this discredits

the claim of the mystic to be aware of an ive reality. If my claims to perceive something ive cannot be

validated by intersubjective agreement, they have no standing (Martin 1959; Rowe 1982).

The best response to this criticism is to charge the critic with what we might call ‘epistemic imperialism’,

unwarrantedly subjecting the outputs of one doxastic practice to the requirements of another. The complaint is that

a mystical perception cannot lay claim to putting its subject into effective touch with ive reality because the

subject cannot validate this status in the same way as with sense perceptions. But there are various sources of

belief that work quite differently from sense experience in this respect. Consider introspection, one’s awareness of

one’s own conscious states. My report that I feel relieved cannot be validated by considering whether someone

else, who satisfies certain conditions, feels my relief. But it would be absurd to reject introspection as a source of

knowledge because of the unavailability of such tests. Unless critics can give a convincing reason for supposing

that the criteria available for sense perception constitute a necessary condition for any experiential access to

ive reality, they are guilty of epistemic chauvinism (to change the metaphor) in rejecting mystical

perception for this reason. Epistemic chauvinism is also exhibited by the first criticism in this section, to which the

response was to ask why one should suppose that a mode of experience different from sense experience in the

ways specified should be less likely to be a source of knowledge.

Another disability of some of the above criticisms is the use of a double standard, whereby mystical perception is

taken to be discredited by some feature it shares with sense perception. This is exhibited by the second and third

criticisms above. We saw that both modes of perception use antecedent conceptual schemes to report what is

perceived, and that both locate the perceived among remote rather than proximate causes of the experience.

The final criticism concerns the fact of religious pluralism, probably the most epistemologically significant

difference between mystical perception and sense perception. Human beings at all times and places and in all

cultures use pretty much the same conceptual scheme to specify what they perceive by the senses. The extent to

which there is less than complete agreement is a matter of controversy among anthropologists and historians, but

the commonality is clearly much greater than it is with mystical experience. The full range of religions, past and

present, differ widely in their conceptions of ultimate reality, and their beliefs about it differ even more widely.

This point still holds if we confine ourselves to contemporary major world religions. Since the conceptions and

beliefs of the various religions are the ones used by people to articulate what they take themselves to be aware of

in mystical experience, those articulations are correspondingly different and often contradict each other.

‘Theistic’ religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam think of supreme reality as a personal creator who

enters into personal relationships with us. Buddhism and certain forms of Hinduism think of ultimate reality in more impersonal terms, as an undifferentiated unity of which nothing can literally be said, or as a void or ‘Nothingness’. The theistic religions also differ in what they believe about what God has done in history, what his plans are and what he requires of us. In the face of this unresolved diversity, how can we think that mystical experience is a conduit of ive truth?

It is important to be clear as to what is and is not involved in this problem. It was pointed out earlier that it would not be sensible to think that mystical perception can generate a complete system of religious belief. Hence the experiential reports of Christians and Muslims might not contradict each other, even though there are contradictions between the two complete bodies of belief. But even if the experiential reports are contradictory to a certain extent, mystical perception could still constitute a genuine awareness of a supreme reality. Two people can

both genuinely perceive something even if they disagree as to what it is like. Two witnesses to a car accident

might both have really seen the accident, though their accounts of what happened are importantly different. By the

same token, mystics from widely different religions might genuinely perceive the same ultimate reality, even if

what they perceive it as is quite different.

Still, it must be admitted that the unresolved incompatibilities in mystical perceptual reports count as negative

evidence for the claim that mystical perception is, often, a genuine awareness of supreme reality, though for the

reasons just given it can hardly be regarded as conclusive evidence against that claim. On this point there would seem to be a standoff between the mystic and the critic, a standoff that would be resolved by strong enough reasons for regarding one of the competing religious traditions to be closest to the truth or, contrariwise, by strong enough reasons for regarding no religions to have any truth about supernatural dimensions of reality.

 

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