Philosophy of Mysticism - Are Mystical Experiences True and Can Gnosis be Trusted?

the knowledge derived from mystical states underwrites practically all of the fundamental truths of the world's religions from the vision of the angel jabril to the prophet muhammad the experience of nirvana under the bodhi tree the vision serpent met in the bloodletting rituals of the maya the tiered heavens of the gnostics the experience of fundamental oneness in the upanishads and in parmenides the experience of encountering pure mind in the hermetic religious philosophy the revealing of the book of the law to aleister crowley in egypt to the birth of the son and the soul of meister eckhart

are the fundamental unity of the sufis and on and on and on ecstatic mystical experiences again and again appear as perhaps the fundamental datum of religion spirituality and religious philosophy for millions indeed billions of people around the world these experiences are taken to be a fundamentally true and foundational cornerstone of almost every aspect of their lives the experiences of mystics even thousands of years after their deaths deeply shape the everyday lives of people from the cradle to the grave but how often do we subject the category of mystical experience itself especially the knowledge said to

be gained in just such experiences to rigorous philosophical analysis rejecting both simple credulity and pseudoscientific dismissal of such states as well basically delusions i want to see just how far philosophy can take us in understanding critically appraising and appreciating the knowledge said to have been gained in mystical states i'm dr justin sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the arcane in history philosophy and religion [Music] as some of you know my academic background is in both religious studies and in philosophy and my day job is mostly teaching philosophy sadly i don't get to explore

philosophical issues relating to esotericism much in my day job well sadly for me but good for the channel because i do get to explore them thanks to the support i get for the channel in this episode i want to unpack just what we might be able to say philosophically at least about the knowledge gained from mystical states by dialoguing with a chapter of richard jones's really wonderful volume philosophy of mysticism i'll give some more recommendations on this topic later in the episode if the intersection of philosophy mysticism and esotericism interests you the best place to

begin our exploration is with william james's seminal 1902 the variety of religious experience where he notes four key elements of mystical experience ineffability that is to say that the mystical experience itself is incapable of being robustly articulated and discursive are propositional forms a noetic quality that's one is said to gain knowledge from the mystical experience that they are transient the mystical experience doesn't last very long and they don't seem to occur according to a pattern and lastly passivity that the experience is often so overwhelming that one is subject to it rather than actively feeling in

control of course there are other characteristics of mystical experiences and perhaps not all such experiences conform to james's typology but this is the goodest place as any to get started the specific aspect i want to focus in on this episode is that of the noetic quality that is that one is said to gain knowledge from the mystical experience oh yeah what do i mean by mystical well this is just a huge ball of wax so i'm just going to put forward a rough and ready preliminary definition as something like an immediate experience of ultimate reality

many religions and private individuals are said to undergo mystical experiences from which they derive scriptures philosophical teachings and other alleged truths about reality human nature even scientific discoveries like the structure of the benzene molecule and so on of course the experience itself like all experiences remains basically a black box which is just to say that no one can really have access to anyone else's experience whether that's via angel scrying your visions brought on via ayahuasca or just the feeling of the sunshine on your face while you i don't eat ice cream but once an experience

is said to have been had or produced knowledge which you can convey to the rest of us philosophy can at that point begin to do what it does it can begin to ask questions and those central questions here for this episode are four one are there grounds for accepting or rejecting the knowledge derived from mystical states and are such experiences veritical two can mystical experiences count as evidence for specific sets of doctoral claims especially those that can't be otherwise investigated three are mystics justified in accepting their own experiences as a veritable and for supporting their

own doctrinal claims and four are non-mystics justified in accepting the experiences of mystics and supporting other doctrinal claims let's explore each of these questions in turn now the first question you might raise is how can a non-mystic evaluate the experiences had by mystics well the simple answer here is that they can't because of the experiences being black boxes like i mentioned earlier but non-mystics are people doing philosophy from a non-mystical viewpoint can evaluate the epistemological and propositional claims made by mystics beyond being just a feeling mystical experiences are very often interpreted by the mystics themselves

and are cashed out in propositional form for instance about ethics what you should and shouldn't do are metaphysics what is the fundamental structure of reality those propositions and the epistemology claimed by the mystics can and should be philosophically investigated by non-mystics indeed i see it as an obligation on the part of philosophy to be as critical and sympathetic as possible to such experiences for two reasons one they touch on fundamental areas of philosophical analysis and two they have such an enormous social and historical impact just writing off experiences of mystics by philosophers and scientists is

as arrogant and short-sighted as it is well on philosophical and unscientific the key issue is that the mystics claim to gain knowledge from such experiences indeed most classical mystics are simply unequivocal on this point their experience has provided them knowledge that is fundamentally eternally true not true for them their religion or philosophy but true for all people at all times and this produces our first dilemma the problem of inconsistent mystical revelation if all mystics all over the world at all times produced the same series of propositions as the result of their experiences that would pretty

much settle the matter they could all be trusted but that isn't what happens such propositions vary widely from mystic to mystic even within religious traditions indeed such propositions very often stand in logical contradiction with one another from a logical point of view radical dualism and radical monism are not compatible metaphysically but both have been forwarded by various mystics through time now we typically settle such a problem of competing truth claims by subjecting them to various experimental or logical testing via a neutral third party obviously that's that's not possible here they're having mystical revelations the experience

of the mystic is idiosyncratic it's quasi-ineffable and it's transient as mentioned by james earlier it just doesn't lend itself to either form of testing at least not longitudinal repeated testing under controlled conditions now there are a few options at this point to deal with this problem you could just reject that the propositions made by mystics should be evaluated with logic at all of course at that point you kind of just get off the philosophy train which is fine though oddly you also have to ignore all those parts where the mystics clearly state that they are

telling us truths capital t truths if some things are true then other things aren't by definition if you want proof of this look at how much mystics this is from christians to buddhists have historically argued with one another over just that point which mystical insights are true and which ones aren't you can reject logic to solve the problem really just ignore it but just note that the mystics themselves aren't really going along with that option with you this is a bit like claiming that you know better than the mystics which is kind of odd considering

that you're going to them to learn stuff and you're also still doing logic despite you saying that you're getting off team logic whatever another solution is to claim that the fundamental mystical experience is the same for all mystics but that the interpretations of those experiences vary because they're always already occurring in a specific culture religious historical setting etc and thus the inconsistency has to do with the theater of interpretation rather than the experience itself the problem here is that again this is claiming to know better than the mystics who very often subject their own mystical

experiences for verification by relying on just those cultural historical and religious touchstones that you just rejected if most mystics are anchoring the truth of their claims within that cultural historical or religious setting it just seems inappropriate or wrong to remove them from those contacts it may be even destructive of the truth value of the very mystical propositions themselves further insofar as classical mystics locate the truth of their mystical claims in those specific contexts by removing them one is basically saying that the specifically christian islamic buddhist maya indigenous etc aspects of their experiences are basically false

or at least fundamentally inconsequential if the world's historical mystics have to have their propositions surgically amputated from their context to be true then by what criteria are we making that excision given that the primary experience itself was non-fungible and unknowable by the person doing the excising and it's just ironic that the very mechanism the historical mystics use to vet and underwrite the truth of their own experiences turns out to be basically wrong for most maybe all historical mystics you can imagine the shock and justifiable indignation of a medieval kabbalist being told by a modern person

that say the tree of life emanationism theory is great but you know all that being jewish and rigorously living according to the jewish law is just that's just parochial fluff we can cut all that out there's just something paradoxical about going to learn from historical mystics these fundamental truths and then basically claiming to know better than them as one cherry picks just those truths with no real rhyme or reason so far as i can tell now does any of that fundamentally undermine the noetic quality of the mystical experience no not at all despite what some

scientists and philosophers may assert the fundamental mystical experience itself may well be noetic and the contradictions may be merely apparent now that doesn't mean this is going to be easy going but let's keep digging let's tackle the question of the verticality of the experience itself there are basically two philosophical means available to us at this point some type of rationalism or some type of empiricism or perhaps some combination of the two rationalism just isn't going to get us very far because experiences just aren't explicable in those terms my experience of talking into a camera right

now or eating an apple like i did earlier isn't rational or irrational it's basically non-rational in that such categories just don't apply typically we say that propositions are said to be rational and experiences just aren't propositions or even beliefs so this really isn't going to help much empiricism however curiously might help here as you probably know empiricism deals with sensation and the trustworthiness of the information that we get from those sensations for instance i take it as vertical that i am currently talking into a camera based on the sensations that i'm currently having it's just

rather common sense ultimately obviously mystical experiences very often have this kind of empirical quality though with some important caveats one while such experiences often appeal to sensation-like language like sight or hearing the principle of ineffability often means that these appeals are often metaphorical in nature though literal seeing and literal hearing in mystical experiences isn't that common second as we mentioned earlier the experiences of themselves are often verified or interpreted by appeals to other sacred authorities that themselves aren't empirically verified for instance when hildegard of bingen anchors the truth of her experience in the bible or

catholic authorities we aren't dealing with sensation any longer but a kind of appeal to sacred authority thirdly one of the things we can expect out of empirical claims is third party verification if we were on a walk together and i see a ufo land in front of us the first thing i'm going to ask you is what are you currently seeing and then kind of go from there hopefully you see it too though that only solves the one problem not the whole ufo just landed in front of us problem now that typically isn't possible with

mystical experiences though i think that buddhist enlightenment tests are actually a very fascinating contra indicator for further research in this respect further for the empirical argument to work we would also have to deal with our post kantian situation where most philosophers yes i see the speculative realists there in the back take it that all of our sensations are conditioned by metaphysical and psychological categories and are thus never immediate as such we also know that sensation and especially memory are deeply fallible for this approach to work we would need an organ of mystical sensation that's the

band name for this episode we would need to know that this organ isn't subject to the same kinds of problems of being theory laden recall mystical experiences are immediate or at least non-mediated and it does not fail like other sense organs or memory or that such failures could be corrected for well the first requirement an organ of mystical sensation is actually present in many cultures such as the soul the active and passive intellect the third eye etc just what those organs are how they might work and if they're even real are philosophical and scientific questions

for another day but i want to point them out as at least making a kind of mystical empiricism well possible as we've seen though requirement 2 does not seem to be met here mystical experiences simply don't interpret themselves and such interpretations are always mediated at some point by the metaphysical cultural and religious filters of the mystic lastly the prospects for a correction process seem bleak given the ineffability and transience characteristics of the mystical experience mentioned earlier though i will say that there is at least some evidence for mystical experimentalism in history and that would be

a fascinating line of research indeed i think aleister crowley touted thalima along these exact lines as quote the method of science and the aim of religion and well maybe appealing to the discourse of science is actually the problem here more on that in just a second so empiricism seems to have at least some advantages at first but as we can see the sensations of the mystic while they can perhaps tell us that an experience has certainly happened they can't vouchsafe the verticality of that experience much less the truth values of the propositions that flow from

it while this isn't a total blind alley there are some serious problems to face and not to my mind have been overcome by historical mystics so let's try something else now at this point you might be saying hey this is unfair you're using enlightenment categories which prioritize skepticism verification and falsification well falsification was never on the table as even possible so notice i just didn't even much knock on that door precisely out of my attempt to be as sympathetic to the claims of mystics as possible if we want full-on porparian falsification on this problem not

that that's what scientists actually do we wouldn't have even gotten this problem into the ring but let's reframe the conversation away from so-called enlightenment categories i say so-called because buddhism for instance has some of the most rigorous history of logical analysis for such claims that predate the european enlightenment by centuries and in a wholly other context the idea that the west is more logical and rational and that the east is more mystical and emotional just isn't true and honestly it just plays into all kinds of orientalist racist stereotypes regardless let's go with a non-skeptical approach

for instance swineburn's so-called principle of credulity which states that one should accept a mystical or religious claim unless one can demonstrate that the experiences themselves were based on some unreliable mechanism or it's overridden by other considerations that defeat the claim so one might imagine a catholic provisionally accepting a vision of the virgin mary unless they found out that the person who had said vision was i don't know high on pcp at the time or that the vision of the virgin included urging people to worship marduk or something now the philosophical naturalist has an obvious criticism

here don't all these mystical claims have in common both these conditions unreliable mechanisms for instance the human brain which we know is profoundly limited and prone to all kinds of failures for which it struggles to internally correct for and overriding criticisms the mountain of contradictions produced by the mystics over the centuries just how is one supposed to stop the principle of credulity from being a principle of just believing what any so-called mystic claims as long as it lines up with what you already believe or you want to believe it seems to easily become a principle

of gullibility especially when socially or communally reinforced you could ask those folks in heaven's gate now yeah you can't ask them because they killed themselves to get on board a spaceship in the tale of a comet in 1997. credulity is a hell of a drug further all of this leads to begging the question we want to know upon what criteria such mystical beliefs should be based and we're told that it should be based on what seems believable given the relatively weak fail-safes of reliability and other overriding considerations which seem to both already be met if

the naturalists are right and are sufficiently vague that they could never be satisfied well if cult leaders have their way the so-called principle of credulity which did in fact seem to be in effect in a great many traditional societies in the past and is alive and well today does seem to suffer from some serious philosophical problems not to mention occasional mass suicides and killing other people to go to heaven or you just can't kill them because they're already dead or just a bunch of skandas or whatever at this point i think the noetic quality and

content of mystical experiences seems deeply maybe even fundamentally undecidable we don't seem to know if it's vertical and it's a strong possibility that we can't know this would render the contemporary concept of unverified personal gnosis upg doubly redundant now if it remains undecidable that likely jeopardizes its overall value though that does seem a very responsible philosophical spot to land to simply withhold judgment the good old epoque of ancient skepticism we don't know we can't know and trying to know much less acting as if you do know will probably lead to all kinds of problems so

a totally respectable position at this point would be to fundamentally withhold assent to any claims of mystical origin though this produces a strange maybe even paradoxical state of affairs mystical experiences are noetic but that very noetic quality is philosophically useless because of its fundamentally undecidable character you can see why mystically inclined people can't abide the hands-off skepticism here intellectually most responsible or not the prize just seems too good and it would be immediate fundamental truths about reality are rad they're rad to the max so let's press this discussion further what are some other options another

approach to settle this issue would be knowing that the noetic data can be compared that the contradictions could be alleviated and that the truth of some of the mystical claims could be successfully adjudicated the major hurdle to the first problem of course is the embeddedness of mystical claims within cultural historical linguistic and philosophical webs of meaning construction for a certain kind of radical epistemological relativist or even for some structuralists such truths are actually created in those systems or webs of meaning and the propositional content cannot be extracted without it being destroyed of course a truly

radical noetic relativist can just believe whatever they want but they would have joined the folks that have gotten off the logic train back near the start of our exploration it seems that insofar as mystics make propositionally similar claims and that we are rigorous in the details then those should count as viable philosophical comparanda okay now what to do with those pesky contradictions now just to be clear this is a completely modern problem classical mystics were happy to accept true mystical differences and as i mentioned earlier furiously argued and even killed each other over those differences

that we want to alleviate these contradictions in this weird ecumenical let's let's all be friends mode is probably just revelatory of a liberal bias around values like multiculturalism that most of us modern people have now that being a bias doesn't make it wrong necessarily but it is a bias historically mystics didn't have this problem modern people at least some of them do so what are some solutions well there are kind of two the first is just mystical relativism the various mystics are just taking various paths up the same mountain or they're all blind people touching

various parts of the same elephant or what have you now i know that the elephant metaphor is rather ancient but historically did it really lead to much in the way of true ecumenicalism no not really the truth is one but the sages know it as many is a great saying but did such a live and let live situation really thrive on the ancient indian subcontinent no just ask the buddhists also ask the rohingya about buddhists live and let live immacumenicalism these days or look into how the llamas ruled ancient tibet the christians and muslims of

course just never really pretended to much in the way of ecumenicalism in history and neither do religious settlers in palestine now philosophy means everyone's a target again i think that a sufficiently liberal relativism so distorts the original mystical propositions and goes against precisely the capital t truths most mystics claim to have found that this just strikes me as appropriating historical people to a liberal multicultural agenda rather than taking them seriously on their own terms whether we like those terms or not especially if we don't like those terms clearly there is some spectrum here and being

systematic in this seems key but i don't want to even think about how many fake feel good roomy quotes i've seen the second potential solution is something like perennialism or perhaps traditionalism where the various contradictions or gaps in our knowledge for the reconstructionists out there orbit around a core esoteric philosophy for which mystics are thought to have had historical access even if only through a glass darkly to crib the apostle paul for this position to work you would have to develop a criterion and to be philosophically rigorous it would have to be a non-arbitrary one

what seems rather challenging but race nation even genetics etc have all been footpoured by traditionalists and well fascists because that's not terrifying at all to settle on the specific exoteric beliefs which point the way to the esoteric beliefs which are in fact perennial given all the philosophical problems we've mentioned thus far needless to say most lists of perennial philosophical truths that i've seen look very unlike what historical mystics actually said and a lot like what 19th and 20th century traditionalists and perennialists wanted them to say it just seems to me that relativism often becomes intellectually

lazy or downright disingenuous you know all those fake roomy quotes and perennialism or traditionalism seem to basically kick the can down the road or just make stuff up here's looking at you the caballon that may not be inherently wrong all religions were made up at some point but calling it perennial or traditional just seems seems pretty ironic well how might we know that we've settled any side of these problems well i don't think logic alone is going to do the trick here and i just want to point out how far i'm willing to go in

my sympathy for this project even putting logic into conversation with other criteria strikes me as deeply philosophically compromised but here we are welcome to compromising your core values time we would need to have some criterion by which to universally assess one set of mystical propositions against the others at least that might give us a clue as to what mystical experience and by extension the noetic content is viable or at least least wrong so mystical survival could be a criterion maybe mystical schools or doctrinal systems based on such mystical schools that have endeared the longest have

done so because they have been i don't know selected by the gods or god or have endured because they are simply more fit for some other factors this however seems to fly in the face of modern pagan reconstructionism whose contemporary mystical experiences are extremely meaningful to them and to their communities or religions that just got destroyed on the slaughter bench of history to crib hegel surely they were all deeply impactful and thought fundamentally true by their adherence in eon's past maybe mystical schools and systems that produce the most psychological or emotional well-being though religions seem

to basically do this at similar levels within some kind of tolerances but how would we even get a data to make a claim like this maybe we could ask the folks in bhutan also positive psychological and emotional states aren't indicative of the truth of anything ask anyone in an organic chemistry class about that they're suffering a lot for the truth maybe the ones that are the richest that's certainly how the so-called prosperity gospel works but it's likely just an indicator of how well a doctrinal system performs in arbitrary historical economic systems like capitalism or from

just killing people and taking their stuff perhaps which produces the most ethical people you can imagine that that story looks pretty bleak and many mystics themselves have used their mystical experiences to justify dreadful social systems like the caste system a whole big bunch of irrational bigotry and mass murder both hildegard of bingham and bernard of clairvaux were enthusiastic supporters of the crusades frankly all of these are so fraught with philosophical problems that they make the problem worse and further there's no clear line connecting any of these metrics with the fundamental issues here the mystical experiences

and their noetic content there might be a criterion worth exploring despite all this mess the analytic philosopher of religion alvin plantiga has argued that christians need not justify any foundations upon which their faith rests because human beings have an innate sense of the divine or a sensus divinitatis which senses the divine like the eye senses light or the ear senses sound though clearly not in an empirical fashion in the same way that i don't need to justify the fact that i'm hearing myself talk i'm currently listening to myself neither perhaps do religious people need to

prove the existence of god nor the noetic qualities of mystical experiences these are epistemologically properly basic to use his terminology it's an innate sense and those who don't sense god are the divine are according to him simply like people who are born blind or deaf their census divinitatis is simply malfunctioning now the ableism aside though atheism would be an interesting kind of disability this has always struck me as biased in the direction of both monotheism and the idea of a personal god but for plantiga that's a future not a bug he argues that christianity is

correct because among all the other religions the sense of the divine is best suited for it this is a bit like augustine's conception of the god-shaped whole but even more refined of course proving this is another problem and why shouldn't it be tuned to detect a non-personal god or perhaps even many gods couldn't a pagan or a monist just claim that the christian sense of the divine is malfunctioning when it detects a personal god much less a god who was killed or who was humiliated on a cross etc now this is certainly an interesting theory

and indeed i've met many people who claim to have just such a sense of the divine or the numinous but this strikes me as just so vague and biased at least in the form developed here by plantiga that without a lot of further work this just isn't going to be much help finally let's ask to what degree a mystic might be reasonably justified in accepting their own experiences as veritical and as counting as evidence for supporting further doctrine by extension the degree to which a non-mystic may be extended the same courtesy the answer here seems

to be yes because in a specific social cultural or religious system such experiences always present themselves against the horizon of just that system of course it would be reasonable to accept them as explicating and reinforcing that very horizon virtually all of our experiences function in just this way now again what's reasonable in a certain cultural historical or social setting is still no fundamental standard for what's actually true but that ship may have sailed at this point how it may have sailed and we were waiting at the bus stop regardless given such a cultural horizon it

does seem rational rational here just meaning that making a decision all things equal make sense in a given situation for instance gambling in the casino knowing that you will lose money over time but having fun is just the unit of analysis here that's reasonable even if it's not rational per se further it also seems reasonable for a non-mystic to accept a mystic's experiences as veritical and the noetic content as true in that situation though if one accepts such a state of affairs as grounds for believing when basically no other justifications are available one should bear

in mind a very important caveat the grounds for belief recall are that they are situated in a specific set of beliefs against a certain social horizon that make the noetic content of mystical experiences reasonable to accept are really explicable at all however those grounds would also make it reasonable for others to reject your ideas as nonsense or even heresy and maybe even justify them violently persecuting you for your beliefs if such actions are reasonable from their point of view further it also makes the naturalist reasonable in their rejection of all such mystical claims because their

criterion of evaluation methodological skepticism in the scientific method or what have you simply has no truck with such claims they can basically deride you as accepting nonsense and calling it religion with just as much legitimacy as you earnestly hold your beliefs to be justified true belief further and this one is really curious if a mystic emerges in your social system for whom the noetic content of their visions foundationally criticizes the very social system which makes for believing any mystical claims such mystics are not to be believed thus rendering mystical innovation basically impossible the very conditions

that allowed for such belief seem to foreclose upon the possibility of religious or mystical innovation it's no wonder that many religious terms for wrong religious belief are the same for the word for innovation this would be a pity of course because most people interested in mysticism see themselves as counter cultural something belief in mystical noesis may actually have to foreclose upon to exist as such i'm just not sure many people interested in mystical truths would also be willing to accept this radical kind of conservativism as part of the trade but that might just be what's

in the cards so to speak so what kind of conclusions might we have reached at this point jones lists five that i'll summarize one having a mystical experience doesn't guarantee the truth of the verticality of the experience nor the subsequent noetic content two even if mystical experiences are veritical there remain real limits of what the mystic can claim to know about those realities note that knowledge and mere belief are epistemologically distinct experiences don't interpret themselves and that interpretation always occurs in a culture in a time in a religion etc three because there are no theory

neutral or objective means to evaluate the noetic content of a mystic's experience we can't know if they are true so such experiences can't strongly count towards the objective truth of any set of doctrinal claims and 4 and 5 it seems reasonable for mystics and non-mystics to accept both the verticality of the experience and the noetic content therein but only in highly circumspect tolerances outside of those tolerances confidence in both must logically decline rapidly those tolerances lead inexorably to a kind of religious social or mystical conservativism this last aspect shouldn't be super surprising to students of

the history of mysticism mystics have proven to be among the most socially and religiously conservative factions within society with the exception of a few antinomians but again they are the exception that proves the rule finally i think we have to conclude that making a completely rational decision here is probably impossible but simply giving in to irrationality would be destructive of any conception of truth at all which contradicts the very desire to seek out mystical truths in the first place of course rudolph auto pioneered the concept of the non-rational where strict logic and irrationalism have a

minimal stakehold and certainly no epistemological monopoly that being the domain of the experience of the numinous indeed i think what's also crucially important to say in all of this is that philosophy and philosophers have done an exceedingly poor job in dealing with mysticism and its claims in recent centuries and it's in the hopes of forwarding and deepening that discussion that i make this episode dealing with precisely the intersection of philosophy and esotericism both because i find much occult philosophy sorely lacking in the philosophy department and also i find that philosophy not taking seriously one of

the most profound aspects of the human experience that of mysticism and the mystical if you're interested in esotericism hermetic philosophy or the intersection of mysticism and philosophy more generally make sure to subscribe and check out my other content on topics and esotericism also if you want to support my work of providing accessible scholarly and free content on topics and other terrorism here on youtube i hope that you consider supporting my work on patreon or with a one-time donation you can find those links below and i deeply appreciate your consideration of supporting this project and the

channel this episode is heavily indebted to richard jones's philosophy of mysticism which i think deals with that topic better than most texts out there his writing is clear it's free from much in the way of jargon and he deals with both eastern and western mysticism in one breath in fact he's an expert in so-called eastern mysticism it's a really fine text and i would recommend it to anyone interested in the intersection of philosophy religion and mysticism more generally of course i mentioned james's variety of religious experience at the very start of this episode it's still

a perfectly fine text to start although obviously philosophy of religion has come a long way since then the classic text on this topic is stasis mysticism and philosophy but it's unfortunately difficult to find these days and rather expensive when you do find it for a more phenomenological approach to this problem the classic text there is going to be rudolph otto's the idea of the holy this episode has taken a rather analytic approach to the topic and i'm sure that i'll come back with a more phenomenological approach heavily featuring otto just to balance things out until

then i'm dr justin sledge and thanks for watching esoterica where we explore the arcane in history philosophy and religion you