APPLIED MYSTICISM: Studies of the Uses of Meditation
and Psychedelics in Secular Contexts
(Forthcoming State University of New York Press, March/April 2025)
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Mystical Experiences and the Neuroscientific Study of Meditators
2. Limitations on the Neuroscientific Study of Drug-Enabled Mystical
Experiences
3. Pure Consciousness, Intentionality, Selflessness, and the
Philosopher’s Syndrome
4. Triggers of Altered States of Consciousness Experiences
5. Cognitive Bias in Mysticism and Its Study
6. Mysticism, Consciousness, and Inverse Multiple Realization
7. The Role of Mystical Experiences in Psychedelic Therapy and Research
8. Secular Mysticism
9. Quantum Mysticism: Sciences Meets Mysticism in the New Age
10. Applying Mysticism to Social Action Today
References
Index
Preface
Today is an exciting time for mystical studies. Scientists in the field of consciousness research are taking mystical experiences seriously (at least as mental events)—they are studying meditators and psychedelic subjects to gain knowledge of the brain and states of consciousness. Interest in such experiences is also ticking upward among academics, the religious, and the spiritual among the unaffiliated (the “nones”). Mindfulness (broadly construed) is now a billion-dollar business worldwide.
This interest today often involves “applied mysticism.” To be clear on terminology, “mystical experience” in this book does not denote all altered state of consciousness (ASC) experiences (e.g., visions or a sense of presence of something distinct from oneself) but only short-term ASC episodes involving a direct (and hence “nondual”) awareness of reality free of a sense of a discrete experiencing self or conceptualized differentiations. In some experiences, a sense of an experiencing self or of conceptual differentiations is only lessened and not completely eliminated. The paradigm of mystical experiences involves an inner awareness of a transcendent source of worldly phenomena (e.g., God or Brahman/Atman) or our true self/soul. But it should be noted that not all mystical experiences are tied to such alleged realities: mindfulness and nature mysticism involves only natural phenomena (and thus are “extrovertive”), but they are still genuinely mystical when “mystical” is defined in terms of experiences of selflessness (see Jones 2021: 9-24 on types of mystical experiences). “Mystical states” are more enduring selfless ASC states. Mystical altered state of consciousness experiences are what distinguishes mysticism from metaphysics or other forms of religiosity, but they are not the goal in traditional forms of mysticism—aligning one’s life with what is deemed basically real is the goal, and the ASC experiences are only part of the process. Mystical experiences may or may not transform an experiencer’s beliefs and outlook, their behavior, or their entire being. “Mystical enlightenment” is an enduring state of consciousness free of a sense of an encased phenomenal ego in which our conceptualizations are not seen as reflections of reality but only as our structuring. In mysticisms that value introvertive mystical experiences as cognitively central, enlightenment is seen as retaining contact with transcendent realities. “Mysticism” will be any encompassing system or way of life devoted to attaining enlightenment or at least a mystical state of consciousness. (See Jones 2021a: 1-62.) The adjective “mystical” will refer to the doctrines, codes of conduct, practices, rituals, institutions, and other sociocultural phenomena centered around a quest to end the sense of self and to end our conceptualizing mind from controlling our experience in order to bring oneself into a life in harmony with what is deemed ultimately real.
“Applied mysticism” is not parapsychology or the techniques, disciplines or practices of a mystical way of life. Nor should applied mysticism be confused with a common usage of the term “practical mysticism”—i.e., the “practical” side of mysticism (any actions by mystics or any practices utilized by mystics in their development [see, e.g., Zarrabi-Zadeh 2009; Gill and Clammer 2019]) or any religious or spiritual motivation for social action (Gray and Lovat 2008). Rather, applied mysticism is taking mystical practices and experiences away from their traditional role in classical mysticism as a means for the total transformation of individual practitioners and applying them (often from a secular framework) to help others with more limited problems of well-being in society, for general social change, or otherwise to deal with this-worldly matters. For example, meditators are letting neuroscientists examine their brain activity during meditations to expand our knowledge of the workings of the brain. So too, Buddhist meditation is taken out of its religious context as part of a way of life trying to end all of our existential suffering (dukkha) by ending our rebirths and adapted by psychotherapists to help with people’s more limited problems such as depression or addiction. These applications may lead some people to move in the direction of adopting a mystical way of life, but that is not their purpose. Rather, the intent is to provide only limited help to others that would make them more effective in some area of their daily life.
The term first appeared in print in a letter from Aldous Huxley to Albert Hoffman (who first synthesized LSD) in February 1962:
I have good hopes that this and similar work will result in the development of a real Natural History of visionary experience, in all its variations, determined by differences of physique, temperament and profession, and at the same time of a technique of Applied Mysticism—a technique for helping individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of the insights from the "Other World" in the affairs of “This World.” Meister Eckhart wrote that “what is taken in by contemplation must be given out in love.” Essentially this is what must be developed—the art of giving out in love and intelligence what is taken in from vision and the experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the Universe.
Timothy Leary also was using the term in 1963. For Huxley, applied psychedelic mysticism was “to show how the inward power of these sacramental drugs could be used for the welfare of people living in a technological society hostile to mystical revelations” (Hoffman 1999: iv). That is, applied mysticism is “a technique for helping individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of their insights from the ‘other world’ in the affairs of this world” (quoted in ibid.: xv). Huxley’s novel Island shows a society that utilizes psychedelics to design their industrialized culture.
Today this alternative to traditional mysticism is growing. Mystical experiences and states—especially the alleged state that is a selfless consciousness free of any differentiated content (“pure consciousness”)—have become of great interest in the study of the brain and the nature of consciousness. Psychedelic-enabled mystical and other experiences and meditation (especially mindfulness broadly construed) are both hot topics in the neuroscientific study of the workings of the brain. Psychotherapists are exploring meditation and psychedelics as ways to help people who are resistant to traditional therapy. Michael Pollan has brought attention to psychedelic therapy in his best-seller How to Change Your Mind (2018). Also on the more popular front, New Age thinkers are extolling the alleged merger of post-Newtonian science (especially physics) with mysticism. New Age gurus are bringing “instant enlightenment” to bear on people’s personal problems. Applied mysticism in the New Age movement ranges from Neo-shamanism to such things as “How to Set Prices Mystically.”
The new field of “contemplative studies” is developing in universities (see Roth 2006, 2014; Gunnlaugson 2014; Komjathy 2018), but this surge in interest is in the effects of meditation on for our psychological and physiological health rather than any deeper mystical goal. The traditional goal of meditation was a deep exploration of the mind to alter our very being, but today meditation is more often only for the pragmatic application for depression and so forth (Goleman and Davidson 2018: 2-3). Traditional meditative techniques may be adopted to calm the mind or to focus attention on the present moment in order to increase happiness or work efficiency, not for living in accordance with reality in the deepest way human beings are capable of. Some public schools, corporations, and MBA programs now have classes on mindfulness to aid in focusing attention, mental flexibility, efficiency, and decreasing absenteeism. Some medical schools are beginning to train physicians in meditation for clinical work in relieving patients’ stress, anxiety, depression, and substance-abuse and for pain management. Even the military now has meditation classes, and meditation is being “weaponized” as part of a program to produce “super soldiers” (Komjathy 2018: 194). Most of these objectives are not core goals of traditional forms of mysticism. Specific compassion meditations that are practiced in schools to help students become kinder to other students is the closest any programs come to traditional mysticism.
On the psychedelic front, many advocates see these drugs as having social repercussions: we can solve social problems by individuals having psychedelic-enabled experiences. The drug researcher Rick Doblin believes that mystical experiences can be a tool for political reconciliation—indeed, psychedelics can usher in a global Pax Psychedelia (Pace and Devenot 2021: 14). Mindfulness and psychedelics are seen as ushering in another “Great Awakening” that will have great positive social changes. In fact, meditation and psychedelics have been hyped as a cure-all for all social problems, although most researchers resist these grandiose claims.
Thus, applied mysticism differs from traditional mysticism in two ways: the focus is limited to particular worldly problems rather than a radical realignment of an individual’s total life with what is most basically real, and mystical insights and practices are applied toward helping others with such problems rather than primarily helping oneself. This does give the false impression that traditional mysticism was completely other-worldly and always self-centered. Mystical traditions differ in the degree of the ideal mystic’s involvement in the world, but not all mystics are escapist or hermits or otherwise concerned only with themselves. (But neither were all classical mystics morally concerned with others.) Daoism is the paradigm of a mystical tradition focused on this world, and the aspects of it that go beyond instructing how individuals should live in the world into governing and warfare are cases of applied mysticism. But mystics throughout most of the history of the Abrahamic traditions also regularly engaged the world. Helping others with worldly needs (note Huxley’s remark above from Eckhart) is a way of bridging the personal nature of mystical inner development with the social world. However, applied mysticism remains more worldly and limited in scope than most traditional mysticism. The psychologist and psychedelic researcher William Richards relates an instance that reflects the new attitude: a successful business leader had a spontaneous experience that met all of Richards’s criteria for a genuine mystical consciousness, but the man’s response to his experience was “That was nice. What is it good for?” (2016: 124). Looking for concrete help with particular problems in this world is the outlook of applied mysticism, not a quest to realign one’s life with how reality truly is.
Applying mysticism to worldly problems makes having a positive impact on the world in general more central than individual enlightenment. It is not about leading others to enlightenment or keeping mystical insights to only a few committed disciples or only teaching a transcendent way to end all our problems, as in most traditional mysticism, but a matter of turning mystical insights into practical help for others with worldly problems. A mystical “insight” may be seen as involving transcendent realities, but for many today it is about simply calming and stabilizing the mind and seeing the interconnectedness of things in the world (both people with people and people with nature). Thereby, mysticism is brought to bear on making the world a better place and helping us feel at home in this world.
Ethics and psychotherapy are the two principal ways that mystical experiences and practices are applied to help others. It has been argued that psychedelic experiences may lead to a selflessness that enhances our cognitive capacity, empathy with others, altruism and service to others in general, and a greater sense of fairness (Ahlskog 2017; Tennison 2012). Virginia Ballesteros (2019) applies psychedelic-enabled mystical experiences toward improving our moral faculties and overcoming our “moral blindness” concerning our environmental and technological obligations. The political scientist Alexander Wendt applies “quantum mysticism” ideas to society and international relations (2015). The “political potential of mindfulness” is being discussed (Chari 2016). Much of the New Age spirituality and the human potential movement exemplified by the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, is applied mysticism. Psychedelics and mystical training can also help in other psychological areas—e.g., with our creativity and imagination which may help scientists and others in their work and with general problem-solving.
In sum, in the words of Gemini (Bard): “Applied mysticism is the practice of applying mystical insights and techniques to everyday life. It's about bringing the spiritual into the practical realm.” That summary omits the central shift from traditional individual mystical concerns to this-worldly ways for helping others, but applied mysticism does, as it says, “seek to bring mystical insights and experiences into the everyday world” and “is not about withdrawing from the world or seeking an escape from reality.” Classical mystics would reject characterizing mysticism as escapist rather than a way to get more in touch with a basic reality, but the new focus on helping others with limited worldly needs cannot be denied.
Whether this repurposing of traditional mysticism for secular ends in exploring the nature of the mind and the workings of the brain, psychotherapy and well-being, and social and political action will last is an open question at present. Whether this trend may end up having a negative impact on traditional mysticism within different religious traditions is also an open question. So too, the scientific interest in mystical experiences and states (if not mystical claims about the world) may lead to a reevaluation of mysticism in our current society. But today mysticism outside its traditional settings is having an impact on society that most see as positive.
* * *
Applied mysticism can be approached by different disciples in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, but this book is a collection of essays limited to expounding the nature of applied mysticism and to examining their philosophical issues. The focus will be on some old and some new questions in philosophy of mysticism that the applied mysticism of meditation and psychedelics raises. This influences both philosophy of mysticism (Jones 2016) and the budding field of philosophy of psychedelics (Letheby 2021, forthcoming; Letheby and Mattu 2021; Hauskeller and Sjöstedt-Hughes 2022).
The first two essays discuss limitations in the foundational knowledge of applied mysticism today in the study of the brain and the mind: the neuroscientific study of meditation and psychedelics. Neuroscience has been chosen because that is the primary science studying mystical experiences today and to see, in an instance of applied mysticism, whether mystical experiences can expand our knowledge of how the brain works and the nature of consciousness. The third chapter more deeply explores whether mystical experience may add to our understanding of consciousness—meditation and psychedelics may give scientists access to consciousness in a way that other experiences cannot, but can there be a “pure” consciousness free of both all differentiated content and a sense of a “self” having an experience? The next three essays delve into aspects of the science of mystical experiences rather than deal directly with applied mysticism. The first deals with triggers of mystical experiences. The second deals with the dangers of expectancy bias and confirmation bias in both mystical experiences and in mysticism and its study. These are followed by an admittedly speculative essay on the possibility of the inverse of the issue of the possible “multiple realization” of mental events in different brain states—that different altered states of consciousness may be grounded in the same brain state. The seventh essay examines the role of mysticism in the psychedelic psychotherapy. Next is an essay on the new secular forms of mysticism: applying psychedelic and meditative practices and mystical experiences to gain well-being and a meaning to life within a naturalist framework void of transcendent realities and traditional religious goals. The last two essays show that mysticism can inspire applied mysticism by both mystics and also by those who have not had mystical experiences. First, the advocates of New Age thought attempt to use ideas from Buddhist and Daoist mystical metaphysics to aid science. This leads New Agers to the claim that modern science and ancient wisdom are merging. Finally, the challenges of applying the classical mysticisms from different traditions to social and political matters today are explored. The fact that this type of applied mysticism has been around for centuries is also noted.
Most of these essays have been previously published, but those have been thoroughly revised here. Some repetitions have been deleted and cross-references supplied, but some duplications are retained so that each chapter remains a self-contained essay. Thus, each chapter can be read separately.
Comments?
© Richard H. Jones 2024
and Psychedelics in Secular Contexts
(Forthcoming State University of New York Press, March/April 2025)
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Mystical Experiences and the Neuroscientific Study of Meditators
2. Limitations on the Neuroscientific Study of Drug-Enabled Mystical
Experiences
3. Pure Consciousness, Intentionality, Selflessness, and the
Philosopher’s Syndrome
4. Triggers of Altered States of Consciousness Experiences
5. Cognitive Bias in Mysticism and Its Study
6. Mysticism, Consciousness, and Inverse Multiple Realization
7. The Role of Mystical Experiences in Psychedelic Therapy and Research
8. Secular Mysticism
9. Quantum Mysticism: Sciences Meets Mysticism in the New Age
10. Applying Mysticism to Social Action Today
References
Index
Preface
Today is an exciting time for mystical studies. Scientists in the field of consciousness research are taking mystical experiences seriously (at least as mental events)—they are studying meditators and psychedelic subjects to gain knowledge of the brain and states of consciousness. Interest in such experiences is also ticking upward among academics, the religious, and the spiritual among the unaffiliated (the “nones”). Mindfulness (broadly construed) is now a billion-dollar business worldwide.
This interest today often involves “applied mysticism.” To be clear on terminology, “mystical experience” in this book does not denote all altered state of consciousness (ASC) experiences (e.g., visions or a sense of presence of something distinct from oneself) but only short-term ASC episodes involving a direct (and hence “nondual”) awareness of reality free of a sense of a discrete experiencing self or conceptualized differentiations. In some experiences, a sense of an experiencing self or of conceptual differentiations is only lessened and not completely eliminated. The paradigm of mystical experiences involves an inner awareness of a transcendent source of worldly phenomena (e.g., God or Brahman/Atman) or our true self/soul. But it should be noted that not all mystical experiences are tied to such alleged realities: mindfulness and nature mysticism involves only natural phenomena (and thus are “extrovertive”), but they are still genuinely mystical when “mystical” is defined in terms of experiences of selflessness (see Jones 2021: 9-24 on types of mystical experiences). “Mystical states” are more enduring selfless ASC states. Mystical altered state of consciousness experiences are what distinguishes mysticism from metaphysics or other forms of religiosity, but they are not the goal in traditional forms of mysticism—aligning one’s life with what is deemed basically real is the goal, and the ASC experiences are only part of the process. Mystical experiences may or may not transform an experiencer’s beliefs and outlook, their behavior, or their entire being. “Mystical enlightenment” is an enduring state of consciousness free of a sense of an encased phenomenal ego in which our conceptualizations are not seen as reflections of reality but only as our structuring. In mysticisms that value introvertive mystical experiences as cognitively central, enlightenment is seen as retaining contact with transcendent realities. “Mysticism” will be any encompassing system or way of life devoted to attaining enlightenment or at least a mystical state of consciousness. (See Jones 2021a: 1-62.) The adjective “mystical” will refer to the doctrines, codes of conduct, practices, rituals, institutions, and other sociocultural phenomena centered around a quest to end the sense of self and to end our conceptualizing mind from controlling our experience in order to bring oneself into a life in harmony with what is deemed ultimately real.
“Applied mysticism” is not parapsychology or the techniques, disciplines or practices of a mystical way of life. Nor should applied mysticism be confused with a common usage of the term “practical mysticism”—i.e., the “practical” side of mysticism (any actions by mystics or any practices utilized by mystics in their development [see, e.g., Zarrabi-Zadeh 2009; Gill and Clammer 2019]) or any religious or spiritual motivation for social action (Gray and Lovat 2008). Rather, applied mysticism is taking mystical practices and experiences away from their traditional role in classical mysticism as a means for the total transformation of individual practitioners and applying them (often from a secular framework) to help others with more limited problems of well-being in society, for general social change, or otherwise to deal with this-worldly matters. For example, meditators are letting neuroscientists examine their brain activity during meditations to expand our knowledge of the workings of the brain. So too, Buddhist meditation is taken out of its religious context as part of a way of life trying to end all of our existential suffering (dukkha) by ending our rebirths and adapted by psychotherapists to help with people’s more limited problems such as depression or addiction. These applications may lead some people to move in the direction of adopting a mystical way of life, but that is not their purpose. Rather, the intent is to provide only limited help to others that would make them more effective in some area of their daily life.
The term first appeared in print in a letter from Aldous Huxley to Albert Hoffman (who first synthesized LSD) in February 1962:
I have good hopes that this and similar work will result in the development of a real Natural History of visionary experience, in all its variations, determined by differences of physique, temperament and profession, and at the same time of a technique of Applied Mysticism—a technique for helping individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of the insights from the "Other World" in the affairs of “This World.” Meister Eckhart wrote that “what is taken in by contemplation must be given out in love.” Essentially this is what must be developed—the art of giving out in love and intelligence what is taken in from vision and the experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the Universe.
Timothy Leary also was using the term in 1963. For Huxley, applied psychedelic mysticism was “to show how the inward power of these sacramental drugs could be used for the welfare of people living in a technological society hostile to mystical revelations” (Hoffman 1999: iv). That is, applied mysticism is “a technique for helping individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of their insights from the ‘other world’ in the affairs of this world” (quoted in ibid.: xv). Huxley’s novel Island shows a society that utilizes psychedelics to design their industrialized culture.
Today this alternative to traditional mysticism is growing. Mystical experiences and states—especially the alleged state that is a selfless consciousness free of any differentiated content (“pure consciousness”)—have become of great interest in the study of the brain and the nature of consciousness. Psychedelic-enabled mystical and other experiences and meditation (especially mindfulness broadly construed) are both hot topics in the neuroscientific study of the workings of the brain. Psychotherapists are exploring meditation and psychedelics as ways to help people who are resistant to traditional therapy. Michael Pollan has brought attention to psychedelic therapy in his best-seller How to Change Your Mind (2018). Also on the more popular front, New Age thinkers are extolling the alleged merger of post-Newtonian science (especially physics) with mysticism. New Age gurus are bringing “instant enlightenment” to bear on people’s personal problems. Applied mysticism in the New Age movement ranges from Neo-shamanism to such things as “How to Set Prices Mystically.”
The new field of “contemplative studies” is developing in universities (see Roth 2006, 2014; Gunnlaugson 2014; Komjathy 2018), but this surge in interest is in the effects of meditation on for our psychological and physiological health rather than any deeper mystical goal. The traditional goal of meditation was a deep exploration of the mind to alter our very being, but today meditation is more often only for the pragmatic application for depression and so forth (Goleman and Davidson 2018: 2-3). Traditional meditative techniques may be adopted to calm the mind or to focus attention on the present moment in order to increase happiness or work efficiency, not for living in accordance with reality in the deepest way human beings are capable of. Some public schools, corporations, and MBA programs now have classes on mindfulness to aid in focusing attention, mental flexibility, efficiency, and decreasing absenteeism. Some medical schools are beginning to train physicians in meditation for clinical work in relieving patients’ stress, anxiety, depression, and substance-abuse and for pain management. Even the military now has meditation classes, and meditation is being “weaponized” as part of a program to produce “super soldiers” (Komjathy 2018: 194). Most of these objectives are not core goals of traditional forms of mysticism. Specific compassion meditations that are practiced in schools to help students become kinder to other students is the closest any programs come to traditional mysticism.
On the psychedelic front, many advocates see these drugs as having social repercussions: we can solve social problems by individuals having psychedelic-enabled experiences. The drug researcher Rick Doblin believes that mystical experiences can be a tool for political reconciliation—indeed, psychedelics can usher in a global Pax Psychedelia (Pace and Devenot 2021: 14). Mindfulness and psychedelics are seen as ushering in another “Great Awakening” that will have great positive social changes. In fact, meditation and psychedelics have been hyped as a cure-all for all social problems, although most researchers resist these grandiose claims.
Thus, applied mysticism differs from traditional mysticism in two ways: the focus is limited to particular worldly problems rather than a radical realignment of an individual’s total life with what is most basically real, and mystical insights and practices are applied toward helping others with such problems rather than primarily helping oneself. This does give the false impression that traditional mysticism was completely other-worldly and always self-centered. Mystical traditions differ in the degree of the ideal mystic’s involvement in the world, but not all mystics are escapist or hermits or otherwise concerned only with themselves. (But neither were all classical mystics morally concerned with others.) Daoism is the paradigm of a mystical tradition focused on this world, and the aspects of it that go beyond instructing how individuals should live in the world into governing and warfare are cases of applied mysticism. But mystics throughout most of the history of the Abrahamic traditions also regularly engaged the world. Helping others with worldly needs (note Huxley’s remark above from Eckhart) is a way of bridging the personal nature of mystical inner development with the social world. However, applied mysticism remains more worldly and limited in scope than most traditional mysticism. The psychologist and psychedelic researcher William Richards relates an instance that reflects the new attitude: a successful business leader had a spontaneous experience that met all of Richards’s criteria for a genuine mystical consciousness, but the man’s response to his experience was “That was nice. What is it good for?” (2016: 124). Looking for concrete help with particular problems in this world is the outlook of applied mysticism, not a quest to realign one’s life with how reality truly is.
Applying mysticism to worldly problems makes having a positive impact on the world in general more central than individual enlightenment. It is not about leading others to enlightenment or keeping mystical insights to only a few committed disciples or only teaching a transcendent way to end all our problems, as in most traditional mysticism, but a matter of turning mystical insights into practical help for others with worldly problems. A mystical “insight” may be seen as involving transcendent realities, but for many today it is about simply calming and stabilizing the mind and seeing the interconnectedness of things in the world (both people with people and people with nature). Thereby, mysticism is brought to bear on making the world a better place and helping us feel at home in this world.
Ethics and psychotherapy are the two principal ways that mystical experiences and practices are applied to help others. It has been argued that psychedelic experiences may lead to a selflessness that enhances our cognitive capacity, empathy with others, altruism and service to others in general, and a greater sense of fairness (Ahlskog 2017; Tennison 2012). Virginia Ballesteros (2019) applies psychedelic-enabled mystical experiences toward improving our moral faculties and overcoming our “moral blindness” concerning our environmental and technological obligations. The political scientist Alexander Wendt applies “quantum mysticism” ideas to society and international relations (2015). The “political potential of mindfulness” is being discussed (Chari 2016). Much of the New Age spirituality and the human potential movement exemplified by the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, is applied mysticism. Psychedelics and mystical training can also help in other psychological areas—e.g., with our creativity and imagination which may help scientists and others in their work and with general problem-solving.
In sum, in the words of Gemini (Bard): “Applied mysticism is the practice of applying mystical insights and techniques to everyday life. It's about bringing the spiritual into the practical realm.” That summary omits the central shift from traditional individual mystical concerns to this-worldly ways for helping others, but applied mysticism does, as it says, “seek to bring mystical insights and experiences into the everyday world” and “is not about withdrawing from the world or seeking an escape from reality.” Classical mystics would reject characterizing mysticism as escapist rather than a way to get more in touch with a basic reality, but the new focus on helping others with limited worldly needs cannot be denied.
Whether this repurposing of traditional mysticism for secular ends in exploring the nature of the mind and the workings of the brain, psychotherapy and well-being, and social and political action will last is an open question at present. Whether this trend may end up having a negative impact on traditional mysticism within different religious traditions is also an open question. So too, the scientific interest in mystical experiences and states (if not mystical claims about the world) may lead to a reevaluation of mysticism in our current society. But today mysticism outside its traditional settings is having an impact on society that most see as positive.
* * *
Applied mysticism can be approached by different disciples in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, but this book is a collection of essays limited to expounding the nature of applied mysticism and to examining their philosophical issues. The focus will be on some old and some new questions in philosophy of mysticism that the applied mysticism of meditation and psychedelics raises. This influences both philosophy of mysticism (Jones 2016) and the budding field of philosophy of psychedelics (Letheby 2021, forthcoming; Letheby and Mattu 2021; Hauskeller and Sjöstedt-Hughes 2022).
The first two essays discuss limitations in the foundational knowledge of applied mysticism today in the study of the brain and the mind: the neuroscientific study of meditation and psychedelics. Neuroscience has been chosen because that is the primary science studying mystical experiences today and to see, in an instance of applied mysticism, whether mystical experiences can expand our knowledge of how the brain works and the nature of consciousness. The third chapter more deeply explores whether mystical experience may add to our understanding of consciousness—meditation and psychedelics may give scientists access to consciousness in a way that other experiences cannot, but can there be a “pure” consciousness free of both all differentiated content and a sense of a “self” having an experience? The next three essays delve into aspects of the science of mystical experiences rather than deal directly with applied mysticism. The first deals with triggers of mystical experiences. The second deals with the dangers of expectancy bias and confirmation bias in both mystical experiences and in mysticism and its study. These are followed by an admittedly speculative essay on the possibility of the inverse of the issue of the possible “multiple realization” of mental events in different brain states—that different altered states of consciousness may be grounded in the same brain state. The seventh essay examines the role of mysticism in the psychedelic psychotherapy. Next is an essay on the new secular forms of mysticism: applying psychedelic and meditative practices and mystical experiences to gain well-being and a meaning to life within a naturalist framework void of transcendent realities and traditional religious goals. The last two essays show that mysticism can inspire applied mysticism by both mystics and also by those who have not had mystical experiences. First, the advocates of New Age thought attempt to use ideas from Buddhist and Daoist mystical metaphysics to aid science. This leads New Agers to the claim that modern science and ancient wisdom are merging. Finally, the challenges of applying the classical mysticisms from different traditions to social and political matters today are explored. The fact that this type of applied mysticism has been around for centuries is also noted.
Most of these essays have been previously published, but those have been thoroughly revised here. Some repetitions have been deleted and cross-references supplied, but some duplications are retained so that each chapter remains a self-contained essay. Thus, each chapter can be read separately.
Comments?
© Richard H. Jones 2024