Café Philos: an internet café

On a forum I frequent is a person who wants to be your guru. He's had some mystical experiences (He claims they are beyond counting), and has reached firm conclusions about the nature of god, the self, and the universe.

Whoever doesn't agree with him is a fool, he says, because he has had so many more profound experiences than they. Better yet, he's even brighter than they are too. How can you beat such reasonable qualifications?

Some of the people on the forum are even impressed by this man. He's witty in his put-downs, you know. A sure sign he's the Buddha.

Some years ago, I did a stint as a firefighter. In the ready room, the room where we waited for the calls, the men would bullshit. "Captain, what do you think of abortion?"

"Simple! Abortion is always wrong."

"Lieutenant, what do you think of abortion?

"It's murder, plain and simple."

"Anderson, what do you think of abortion?"

"There's no two ways about it: A woman has a right to choose."

The men would bullshit like that until a call came in.

Then they'd get real.

A fire does not favor firm conclusions. Fighting a fire is a game of odds. A game of probabilities. You cannot be certain what the fire is going to do. You can't bullshit a fire.

In a fire, you calculate the odds, take your best chance, and go with it. You don't look for absolute truth. There is none. You don't reach absolute conclusions because you're not a fool. You stay alert. You remain open to the changing reality.

Reality is always changing. It's just that most of our time is spent in the ready room where we don't notice it changing. So, we relax and bullshit. We speak with absolute conviction. We even call that kind of talk, "being serious". But it's light years from being serious. It's light years from reality.

I suppose it's possible that "seeing god" somehow leaves a person with absolute convictions about god, the self, and the universe.

But if I had to bet on that, I'd bet those absolute convictions are simple, fundamental misinterpretations of what he or she experienced. I'd bet what they really experienced was just as uncertain as dancing with fire.



(Photo courtesy of Ernest von Rosen, www.amgmedia.com)

Now and then, I run across someone who wishes to ban all religion. Yet, as many people know, that's impossible. It doesn't matter how bad it gets. Even if religion were identified as the sole cause of a thousand wars, a hundred thousand famines, a billion murders and a zillion cruelties -- and even if everyone knew religion was the sole cause of those horrible things -- religion would never be rejected by the vast majority of people.

At best, people would soundly reject the use of religion to justify wars, famines, murders, and cruelties. But the large majority would not reject religion itself. And that's not because people are stupid. Instead, it's because there are at least two reasons why most of the world's population is religious, and neither reason has much to do with people being stupid.

To understand those two reasons, let's imagine for a moment that some future world wide society idealistically decides to do away with all religion. And to make this a little bit interesting, let's say everyone in the world -- without exception -- agrees that religion should be done away with. Furthermore, they agree the best first step to doing away with all religion is to abolish the core belief of so many religions: God.

Everyone fully cooperates in this program to abolish god. They quite talking about god. Then they zealously search out every reference to deity in the world's literature and censor those references out of existence. They tear down all the holy houses around the world. They burn and blow up all the holy art. Finally, there is not a single reference to a deity in all the world, and moreover, not even one person in all the world is left who will talk about deity.

If all that could happen, the notion of god would still be reborn within the next generation.

The first and most powerful reason that would happen is humans are innately wired with the basic concept of deity. God is in our genes. That's not to say any particular god is in our genes. We certainly are not genetically programed to believe in the god of the Bible. Nor the god of the Gita. Nor the god of the Qur'an. But, as Scott Atran points out, we are genetically programed to view the world in certain ways -- ways which easily predispose us to a belief in deity. Unless we humans genetically engineer that way of viewing the world out of our nature, the concept of deity will be reborn with each generation.

While the first reason affects nearly all of us, the second reason affects only some of us. It seems some people experience god. More precisely, they have experiences they interpret as experiences of a god. Quite often, people who "experience god" come to believe their experience is proof that deity exists. So, even if you eliminated in a single generation all references to deity, there would still be in the next generation some people who experienced deity and concluded that deity exists.

There will always be people who wish to ban religion, but if only for those two reasons, the task is impossible, unless people somehow change human nature.

Are there any lessons to be drawn from this?

Perhaps the single most important lesson that might be drawn from the above is that trying to convert believers into non-believers is probably less likely to succeed than trying to convert irresponsible believers into responsible believers. You need not abolish religion to ameliorate all or most of its negative effects. So far as I know, there is little evidence the European Enlightenment significantly reduced the number of people who believed in deity. But it certainly reduced the number of people who believed in burning heretics at the stake.

What other lessons, if any, might be drawn from all this?

This morning I was surfing blogs. One link led to another and I found myself on a site devoted to "mysticism". But as I read the site's introduction, I was struck by the author's insistence that God exists ontologically:

"Basically all religions teach the same basic truth: man's existence has a metaphysical basis, to which man wants to relink his life. This metaphysical basis is usually referred to as God, Brahman, Allah etc. But it is the same in every man. This magnificent and unspeakable source of life and happiness will here be called the God/Brahman, but you can give it any name you want, according to your own convictions."

Man's existence has a metaphysical basis? I doubt anyone wisely begins a study of mysticism by assuming god exists ontologically, as some kind of metaphysical entity. That's like preparing to shop for groceries by assuming you already have enough food in your house: It's a foolish assumption that will retard your progress until you discard it.

The spirit and substance of mysticism is to discover whatever there is to discover through one's own experience. Mysticism is not theology, and, unlike theology, it is not fundamentally speculative, nor is it hearsay. Instead, mysticism is grounded in direct experience, in personal discovery.

Personal experience is open ended and uncertain. Hence, mysticism is open ended and uncertain. I cannot today tell you with absolute certainty how I will feel tomorrow. Perhaps I will bounce out of bed feeling like a new man. Perhaps I will wake up with a cold. If I cannot even tell you with absolute certainty how I will feel tomorrow, how much of a fool must I be to pretend it is absolutely certain God is an ontologically existing metaphysical entity?

"Satan is the one who plants wicked thoughts in our minds." I read those words on a site yesterday and they stopped me for a while as I wondered what kind of fearful struggle their author must experience to believe that each time he has a wicked thought it comes from Satan. Can you imagine?

Suppose he thinks, as it seems so many religious people do, that even his sexual desires are wicked? Well, according to some psychologists, one thinks of sex every few minutes. Does he feel he's wrestling with Satan every few minutes?

How can one cope with such a monstrous notion -- the notion one's mind is wrestling with Satan? How could one ever be at peace with oneself?

I'm certain I have thoughts he would consider wicked, and therefore from Satan. But I don't see my thoughts the way he does. I'm not in a struggle against any of my thoughts -- to struggle against an unpleasant thought just prolongs it in consciousness. To be frightened of a thought reinforces it, makes it stronger. To condemn a thought just fixes it in memory.

As best I can, I watch my thoughts. I'm attentive to them. But I don't struggle with them. I don't condemn them. I just idly watch them come and go.

I think that poor man must go around in circles, like a puppy chasing his own tail. Perhaps he's struggled so hard against his wicked thoughts that he's committed all of them to memory, where they ever lie in wait to pop up again and again. Perhaps he's reinforced the neural pathways of those wicked thoughts so much they are extremely robust and crowd out most other thoughts.

It would be ironic if I had more wicked thoughts than he did with the difference being I forget my many while he never forgets his few.

"One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc."

"As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness."

"So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I’d like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents."

- Sam Harris

"[O]ur habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering."

- Sam Harris

"In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life."

- Alan Watts

When you put two arches side by side each other, you create a triangular space between them called a "spandrel" (see photo).

Now, a spandrel is not something intended, but is rather the side-effect of placing arches adjacent to each other. Whenever you place arches side by side each other, you get a spandrel -- whether you want one or not. That fact inspired the biologist Stephen J. Gould to borrow the term from architecture in order to describe any feature of an organism that did not itself evolve for an evolutionary reason, but was instead a side-effect of some other feature's evolution.

Suppose, for instance, that natural selection results in a wolf's snout getting longer and longer. Further suppose that, as a side-effect of the snout getting longer, the wolf's face just happens to get narrower (Maybe by accident the wolves with genes for long snouts also had genes for narrow faces). So, unlike the snout, the narrow face is not caused by natural selection. If that were to happen, the narrow face would be a spandrel.

Recently, Scott Atran and others have been arguing that human religiosity is at least to some extent a spandrel. Specifically, Atran has argued that belief in supernatural agents -- gods, demons, spirits, and so forth -- is a spandrel. (Belief in supernatural agents is not the sum of human religiosity, but it's a very large chunk of the sum.) So, if Atran is right, the fact every known culture and society has contained one belief or another in supernatural agents is merely an accident of human evolution. There was no natural selection for such beliefs. It merely happened as the by-product of selection for other things.

By product of natural selection or not, the belief in supernatural agents is now part of our genetic make-up. Thus, it is very unlikely we will eliminate religion so long as humans are human. And that is a radically different view than the notion religion will die out as science progresses. If anything, only the forms are likely to change. People might give up their belief in the Christian God, for instance, only to adopt a belief in other supernatural agents, such as seems to be happening in parts of Europe.

Yet, how does Atran explain the various expressions of religiosity that do not seem to involve any belief in supernatural agency? Atheistic Buddhism, for instance. From what I can gather, he doesn't have an explanation for those forms of human religiosity. That is, Atran does not argue that such things as the notion of enlightenment are spandrels in the way that such things as the notion of gods are spandrels.

I tend to think Atran is largely correct in saying the human tendency to ascribe supernatural agency to things is a by-product of the evolution of other human traits. On the other hand, I think some religious notions, such as the notion of enlightenment, have come about, not because we are genetically predisposed to create them, but as a result of experience. So, while I accept that Atran has gone far to explain the origins of some aspects of human religiosity, I don't think he has explained the origins of all aspects of human religiosity.


Reference:

Darwin's God

Thirty years ago, I took a course called "Images of Man" in which we studied and discussed some seven different models of human nature. That was a very exciting time of life when I was discovering all sorts of grand ideas.

I was discovering ideas that I had until then only heard rumors about -- such as what time was to a physicist, what the subconscious was to a psychologist, or what culture was to an anthropologist. It had not occurred to me before taking the "Images of Man" course that our notions of human nature were human inventions. Indeed, when I look back on my growing up, I am astounded at how many very obvious things I had to learn.

Naturally, there was a woman involved.

No one at 19 should be forced to learn about time, the subconscious, culture, or any of a hundred other grand ideas without being in love. That would just be cruel. Worse, it could lead one to become a neoconservative.

Until I fell in love with a woman in my "Images of Man" class, I was very confused about love -- I really didn't know the difference between simply loving and possessively yearning. So, to me, love was heartbreak, a miserable state, something to be avoided, and when impossible to avoid, to be cursed. Then, of course, I met Alison and discovered the extraordinary affirmation of life that naturally comes from loving without expectation of any reward.

One of the models of human nature we studied that term introduced me to the concept of enlightenment. Have you ever considered how close enlightenment is to love? I don't think I really grasped much of the concept of enlightenment from that one class, but I would have grasped far less of it had I not been in love.

When compared to the torturous confusion of mere yearning, love is simple, clear, non-possessive, and straight-forward. When compared to the torturous confusion of non-enlightenment, enlightenment is simple, clear, non-possessive, and straight-forward. Perhaps the two are even inextricably entwined.

It even seems to me now, thirty years later, that I learned more about certain aspects of human nature from loving Alison than I did from studying the various models of human nature presented in the class.

Unless you are trying to pass a class in metaphysics, whether god ontologically exists or not is trivial at best and more likely irrelevant. It's true that discussing the issue can, if done well, exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking, but so can many other issues exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking. Overall, wondering whether god exists or not is nearly pointless -- except perhaps as a way of distracting ourselves from dealing with more authentic challenges of living.

Underlying the mistaken notion that god's existence or non-existence is vitally important are the assumptions that god, merely by god's ontological existence, saves us from meaninglessness, makes sense of our suffering, preserves us from eternal death, is with us in times of need, and so on and so forth. Yet, not one of those things can be demonstrated -- not to you, not to me, not to anyone.

The mere ontological existence of god implies almost nothing about the nature of god or god's relationship to us. For instance, suppose that tomorrow someone finally proves the universe must necessarily have a creator, and therefore god must ontologically exist. Fine. But would it necessarily mean anything to us? Would it mean there was salvation from eternal death? Would it mean god in any way cares for us? Would it tell us a thing about whether god has a purpose for us or not? On what grounds could anyone answer "yes" to those questions?

Yet, it is crucial to point out here that some people experience god. To be precise, they have an experience of something they choose to name "god". Other people, having similar experiences, choose to say they experienced the Tao, the Buddha-Nature, the Great Spirit, the Void, the Ultimate Weirdness, or some other placeholder. It doesn't much matter what people call their experiences experiences of. That seems to be more determined by what society, religious tradition, or culture they come from than by anything else. What matters is those experiences are so often transformative.

They are transformative in ways the mere ontological existence of god is not. For instance, someone who has had such experiences might find they no longer fear dying. Not because they now believe in a life after death, nor because they now have a reassuring theology, but simply because they have changed, been transformed, into someone who doesn't fear death. Likewise, someone who has had such experiences might find they are now capable of much greater love. Again, not because they believe god ontologically exists and has commanded them to love, but simply because they have been transformed into someone who is more loving. While the ontological existence of god (or the Tao, or whatever) is at best trivial, the experience of god is often profoundly transformative.

The question of whether god exists or not is insignificant compared to the transformation that can occur when one experiences god. Moreover, that transformative experience does not come about from believing in god. You can believe in god to your heart's content, but all your hours of belief will do nothing to bring about a transformative experience of god. Why is that?

"God" is just a symbol -- no more, no less. To say you believe in god is quite the same -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in the star that represents Paris on a map of France. It is just as insignificant -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in your wife's name. Nor does it matter in the least how elaborate, sophisticated and complex your notion of god is. For does it matter whether you say you believe in the star that represents Paris on one map, or you say that you believe in the more detailed street map that represents Paris on a different map? In both cases, your mere belief will not be the same thing as an actual experience of Paris -- regardless of how passionately or fervently you believe.

For those reasons, belief in god is quite often mere escapism. It is like reading a map of Paris rather than visiting Paris. It can be no more than a longed for daydream.

At Andersonville during the American civil war, the Union soldiers who were held prisoner there by the Confederates lacked salt. When you go without salt, you begin to crave it, and the craving of some of those soldiers became so intense that they would cut the world "salt" from their Bibles and chew the word. It did nothing to preserve their lives -- they starved for salt anyway. But it had a psychological effect on some of those who ate the word. It comforted them.

For many people belief in god is just such a comfort. It does nothing to really nourish them spiritually, it is by no means as transformative as experiencing god, but it does give them a morale boost -- just as eating the word "salt" comforted some of the soldiers who did it at Andersonville. Perhaps ironically, I think most of us would prefer the comfort of believing in god to the experience of god. That might be why we place so much emphasis on whether we believe or not.

"Nobody today is normal, everybody is a little bit crazy or unbalanced, people's minds are running all the time. Their perceptions of the world are partial, incomplete. They are eaten alive by their egos. They think they see, but they are mistaken; all they do is project their madness, their world, upon the world. There is no clarity, no wisdom in that!"

- Taisen Deshimaru



This might be the first time I've seen a Zen Buddhist so lament "people today". I confess I largely agree with him! I think he might describe most of us to one extent or another. Yet, I don't recall ever having read in any accurate history of an age when his lament would not be true of most people. Those who are not "a little bit crazy or unbalanced" have always been as rare as monks -- maybe even as rare as Buddhas. The notion there was a Golden Age in which people in general were fundamentally much better and wiser than they are today is a myth, rather than an historical reality.

Yet, does that mean we should forgo trying to be as wise and sane as possible? Of course not! The fact there are some very wise and sane people in this world means it is possible to be very wise and sane. Maybe the vast majority of humanity will always be -- as humanity has always been -- "eaten alive by their egos." Yet, that does not mean all of us need be.

Had the Buddha been a god, like Christ, people would say, "Enlightenment is only possible for gods", and "Only the Buddha was fully authentic". They say those things about Christ, you know. "Only Christ was perfect." And, "Only Christ could love everyone". To make your mentor a god is a form of escapism. It's a way of denying your potential.

"[A]ll they do is project their madness, their world, upon the world." Your enlightenment will not solve all the world's problems. But perhaps it will mean that you become aware -- deeply aware -- of when you are projecting your madness, your world, upon the world. Then you can at least choose wisely whether to do it or not. As near as I know, that's one of the things enlightenment most does for you -- makes you wise and sane.

It does not make the world's problems go away. If you have no skills and are unemployable before you are enlightened, you will have no skills and be unemployable after you are enlightened, etc. But perhaps you will have a realism, a wisdom, and a sanity about your situation that you never had before. And that, of course, can help you meet your challenges quite a bit better than you have ever met them before.

Krishnamurti observed that no one seeks enlightenment until they get into trouble. It's only when we suffer, and wish to escape our suffering, that the possibility of enlightenment becomes a burning, passionate goal. Yet, as Krishnamurti once again said, when we seek enlightenment as an escape from suffering, enlightenment will not come. We will find some escape, but it will not be enlightenment.

Most of us will always want to live as the people Taisen Deshimaru laments. We will never experience a crisis so profoundly unsolvable that we are forced by it into enlightenment. For some say enlightenment comes only when every form of escape has been exhausted. Perhaps that is why so few people are enlightened and why every age has a right to repeat Taisen Deshimaru's lament.

"The insight that everybody and everything has surfaced to the enlightened state of mind simultaneously with you is definitely accompanying the very moment of realization. This is why you know that the reality is perfect. It is not perfect in its potentiality, it is perfect in its fully actualized state, standing with you hand in hand, face to face."

"This feeling is extremely pronounced in the first several weeks following the enlightenment. Talking, even thinking about it is felt to be as superfluous as asking a fellow passenger on a train: "Are you, too, traveling in this train?" It's meaningless. Since everybody else is also enlightened, what's there to talk about?"


- Alex Bunard Source

"As soon as you conceive of the Buddha, you are forced to conceive of sentient beings, or of concepts and no-concepts, of vital and trivial ones, which will surely imprison you between those two iron mountains."

- Huang po Source

This morning I wish to make a prediction: In the not too distant future, science will increasingly confirm the notion of a few scientists today that humans are hard wired for mystical experiences.

I figure it's just a matter of time at this point before today's sophisticated research techniques uncover neuro-pathways in the brain associated with mystical experiences. Why? Because mystical experiences are a cross-cultural and cross-historical phenomenon that seem upon study to be significantly distinct from mere insanity. Since they are found in all cultures and times that we're aware of, the experiences must have some innate basis in the brain. And since they are significantly distinct from madness, they most likely are associated with their own neuro-pathways, rather than representing a dysfunction of some sort.

Of course, once those pathways are discovered, some people will speculate the Judeo-Christian God put those pathways there so we could know Him. I can see quite a few problems with that line of speculation, but it's bound to make the covers of Time and Newsweek anyway. That's just how we are.

More importantly, would the discovery of a neuro-pathway for mystical experiences eventually lead to "enlightenment on demand"? I'd be willing to bet "yes".

But if everyone's enlightened, just what the hell are we gonna do with all the out of work bimbo talk show hosts?

When we assume God is other than an experience -- such as when we assume God ontologically exists -- we take a step away from God and a step towards idolatry.

Concerning matters of spirituality, the profounder distinction is not between those who believe in God and those who don't, but rather between the mystic and the non-mystic. The former distinction is a matter of mere belief, the latter distinction is a matter of awareness.

I have no reason to believe in the ontological existence of God, but I have every reason to believe in the experience of "God" -- or whatever one wants to call a certain kind of mystical experience.

That's not quite so profound a statement as one might sometimes think. As any sophomore who has taken a course in philosophy knows, it is quite problematic to prove the ontological existence of anything, let alone deity. I can no more prove the ontological existence of God than I can prove the ontological existence of my friend Eryn. Yet, my experiences of "Eryn" exist regardless of whether Eryn herself ontologically exists. In the same way, experiences of "God" do happen to folks regardless of whether God ontologically exists or not.

That might raise an interesting question: If we cannot know whether God ontologically exists, then of what value are any experiences of "God"?

One way to answer that question is to stick with the parallel: If I cannot know whether Eryn ontologically exists, of what value are my experiences of Eryn? A short answer to that is my experiences of "Eryn" are valued by me regardless of whether I have any philosophical doubts that such an utterly fascinating person as Eryn could exist or not. The same can be said about any experiences of "God" I might have: The ontological existence of God simply has no impact on whether or not I value the experience of "God".

Yet, I can look at that same question -- what is the value of experiencing "God" in a wholly different light. That is, the experience of "God" seems transformative in ways that normal experience is not. In future posts, I might get into the ways in which experiencing "God" can transform us psychologically and spiritually. But here it is only important to note that the experience of "God" can be valued as a transformative experience even if no God ontologically exists. In a sense, that's really saying no more than I can enjoy the experience of talking with "Eryn" even if no Eryn ontologically exists.

So far as I myself am concerned, God only matters insofar as the experience of "God" matters.

"Where 'that' and 'this' cease to be opposites, you'll find the hinge of Tao."

- Chuang Tzu

I'm up late and thinking about God. After all, this is Colorado Springs -- there's not much else to do this time of night but think about God.

For some people, mostly mystics, the word "God" refers to a certain kind of experience.

Their meaning for the word "God" is somewhat at odds with what most people might mean by "God". For most people, "God" is not an experience, but instead an entity that exists independent of anyone's experience. That is, a being.

I sometimes think the two camps are a bit like folks who have traveled to France versus folks who have stayed home. The travelers think of France in light of their experiences. But the homebodies don't have any such experiences, and without any actual experience, they have no reality-check on their thoughts about France.

Perhaps the homebodies resort to reading maps to learn about France. That often seems to propel them headlong into very quaint arguments over which maps of France are true or not.

Quaint, because so often the arguments focus on such absurdities as whether it is more accurate to symbolize Paris with a dot or a circle, or on which map is the oldest and thus in some thoughtless sense "primal".

Most of the billion or so arguments about the nature of deity that this world has seen are not arguments between mystics -- mystics more or less tend to agree on the nature of deity. Instead they are remarkably petty arguments between non-mystics.

Whether or not the mystic's experience of "God" is of an entity that exists independent of the mystic herself is an interesting but ultimately trivial question. Of what final importance is it whether France exists independent of my experience? All that really matters to me is whether I can make reasonably accurate predictions about France. I need not assume the country exists independent of my experiences of it to do that -- although, it seems that by assuming such I can create the simplest possible model for predicting my experiences of it.

So, too, it's of little final importance whether anything -- including "God" -- exists independent of my experiencing it. All that really matters is whether I can make reasonably accurate predictions about my experiences of something -- including "God". It is just as feasible to model "God" as merely an experience as it is to model "God" as a being. Either model can predict with equal accuracy our experiences of "God".

Does any of that make sense, or should I have gotten some sleep before tackling the subject?

Are at least some mystical observations intersubjectively verifiable?

At first, it might appear the most truthful answer to that question is, "No, mystical observations are not intersubjectively verifiable." For one thing, mystical observations are not replicable at will. There appears to be no path or technique that guarantees someone employing it will have a mystical experience. And if you cannot replicate a mystical experience at will, how can you assert that what mystics observe during their experiences is intersubjectively verifiable?

On the other hand, there are some surprising agreements among mystics of different cultures and ages about the things they have observed during their experiences. For instance, mystics of different times and cultures have spoken about experiencing a sense, perception, or feeling that all things are profoundly interconnected. Since those mystics can have lived in cultures and times as separate from each other as 1200 A.D. Spain from 500 B.C. China, there is little chance that their agreement is a matter of their having influenced each other. In short, it's pretty clear that at least some mystical observations are intersubjectively verifiable even though they cannot be replicated at will.

At this point, however, we must be very careful not to take mystical experiences as irrefutable evidence of something they are not irrefutable evidence of. For instance, as stated above, mystics commonly enough experience a sense, perception, or feeling that all things are profoundly interconnected. Can we therefore conclude on that basis alone that all things are indeed profoundly interconnected? No. For to do so would overlook the possibility the mystics are experiencing a sort of common delusion. We know, for instance, that people of different ages and cultures can experience the same optical illusions. What is there to keep us from judging that a sense, perception or feeling of profound interconnectedness is not some kind of commonly shared illusion?

While mystic experiences might be delusions, and therefore cannot be taken as conclusive evidence that, say, all things are profoundly interconnected, it's also possible they are not delusions, for we have no independent evidence that they are indeed delusions. So, the jury is still very much out on whether such mystical observations as the profound interconnectedness of all things is a delusion or not.

Where the jury is no longer out is on the question of whether mystical experiences are intersubjectively verifiable -- I submit they are indeed intersubjectively verifiable, even though we don't know whether they are delusions or not, and even though we cannot replicate them at will. Of course, the main reason I might believe they are intersubjectively verifiable is because I haven't had enough good beer yet today to be thinking clearly. So, what do you think?