The question, for me, is whether the mystical experience is self-validating or potentially misleading. While you’re in it, it feels true and profound, and it can transform the mystic’s life. But that doesn’t mean the mystic’s explanation of the experience is necessarily the best. When you’re having the sense that you’re the divine subject of all experience, you won’t feel the need for philosophical doubts, or you won’t fear such doubts since the answers come in a way that seems to precede logic, intuition, and ordinary perception.
But there’s still a choice to make about whether to take that experience for granted, siding with its mode of understanding, or whether to contextualize it, siding with the cognitive faculties that work in the mundane order. There are deflationary interpretations of what goes on in the mystical state. I personally applied them to my cannabis highs, which I wrote about. It’s easy to understand how a peak state of consciousness scrambles normal brain functioning, reducing inhibitions or combining modules that are normally held apart. There are altered states of synesthesia in which sounds have visual appearances, and sights have sounds or smells. Should those experiences be taken at face value and as revealing the true nature of the world? Or should we apply science to understand what’s happening in the brain?
The mystic is a kind of radical empiricist or positivist who makes an initial choice to side with his or her first-person experience, and to demote reason, rational understanding, and the five senses. This means, though, that when you say, “To identify as the capacity for life instead of one of its contents is not intuition and it is not an intellectual understanding; it is a type of knowing or seeing,” I think it’s arbitrary to call it “a type of knowing or seeing.” Those metaphors become stretched because the initial presumption that first-order experience suffices for understanding demotes knowledge and sensation. What you’re left with is the structure of consciousness, the essence of qualia, and you’re slapping labels onto it that apply, rather, to the more advanced products of cognition.
Qualia, by themselves, entail an ultimate haver of mental contents. That’s what it seems like to undergo qualia. But understanding qualia calls upon other mental faculties, and once you recognize a plurality of cognitive faculties, you’re back in the mundane, natural order, and you’ve lost the mystical unity. That unity appears when you forget about the plurality, and you train yourself to shut down certain mental processes. In that altered state things will seem unified. But that seeming isn’t yet a kind of understanding, knowledge, or perception. That’s the leap I’d dispute, at any rate.
