From Mysticism to a Modern Spiritual Cognition
Robert A. McDermott
This essay falls into three parts. First, it reviews the disagreement between Huston
Smith,1 who contends that there are pure, unmediated experiences, and Steven Katz,2 who
argues that all experience is mediated (fashioned, informed) by a variety of linguistic,
epistemic, and cultural determinants. Second, it reworks this disagreement in the context
of the evolution of consciousness, as detailed by Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield.3
Third, drawing on the first two sections, it recommends a theory and practice of spiritual
cognition that claims to be appropriate to modern Western spiritual capacities and needs
and, in so doing, would seem to combine the speculative richness of Smith’s case for the
mystical and primordial with the critical caution of Katz’s cultural relativism.
CLAIMS FOR AND AGAINST UNMEDIATED EXPERIENCES
In a widely discussed book, Forgotten Truth—The Primordial Tradition,4 and in a
series of essays, Huston Smith has proven to be an effective proponent and defender of a
position variously referred to as perennialism or the primordial tradition. In one of these
essays, Smith summarizes the primordialist position with a double claim:
Primordial means “no matter where or when,” and the primordial claim is
that there is, first, a Reality that is everywhere and always the same; and
second, that human beings always and everywhere have access to it.5
In summarizing his research on the epistemology of mysticism, on the other hand,
Katz insists that every conception of reality is limited by the cultural and linguistic
context of the experiences. Whereas for Smith, mysticism and primordial experience
affirms “a Reality which is everywhere and always the same,” Katz insists that “there are
no pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences.”
Smith’s article argues on behalf of the primordial, and Katz’s article explicitly
concerns the mystical, but the logic of the claims on both sides clearly indicates that in
this debate these terms are interchangeable. The difference between Smith and Katz with
respect to the mystical, perennial, primordial, and the esoteric hinges entirely on whether
there are any unmediated experiences. In rejecting the possibility of unmediated
experience, Katz, in effect, rejects the universal or absolute cognitive results of all four of
Smith’s terms.
1
Huston Smith, “Philosophy, Theology, and the Primordial Claim,” Cross Currents (Fall 1988): 276-88.
Stephen T. Katz, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
and Mysticism and Religious Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
3
See especially Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1969), chapter 5; Stewart
C. Easton, Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1975),
chapter 2; and Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1987), and History, Guilt and Habit (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979).
4
Published by Harper & Row in 1977.
5
Smith, “Philosophy, Theology, and the Primordial Claim,” 276.
2
Before placing this debate in an evolutionary context—which will attempt to alter
both positions and, thereby, the entire dispute—we should consider the positions of
Smith and Katz in their own words. Smith concludes “Philosophy, Theology, and the
Primordial Claim” as follows:
The charge that the primordialist must face is elitism. Is there a
reading of sacred texts which, without bypassing their literal meanings,
presses beyond those meanings to deeper ones that inform their exoteric
expressions without depending on them? Obviously it is a rhetorical
question; the traditionalist believes that there is such a reading and that he
is trying to exercise it. Blues is not red, but it is not light in its purest
form, unless it is of a given hue. Meanwhile academicians have become
so fearful that a hue will be overlooked or that some that are known will
be victimized—marginalized is the going word—that they deny the
existence of light itself. There is nothing that hues instance and embody;
nothing, in deconstructionist language, that texts signify. All that exists is
an endless stream of signifiers.
The primordialist believes there is such a thing as light in itself—
pure white light that summarizes all the wave-lengths—and that is the
Light of the World.6
In affirming the Light that is the Source of All, Smith is making a claim that has the same
logical and epistemological presupposition as a claim for the mystical or the esoteric.
In the second of his two significant articles on the epistemology of mysticism
(1983), Katz summarizes the findings of his research. As the following passage clearly
indicates, Katz offers an unambiguous rejection of unmediated experience:
I began with a question and an epistemological generalization
based on the study of the data and reflection thereon. The question I tried
to answer was: “Why are mystical experiences the experiences they are?”
And in order to begin to answer this query, I adopted as a working
hypothesis the epistemic thesis that there are no pure (i.e., unmediated)
experiences. Neither mystical experience nor more ordinary forms of
experience give any indication, or any grounds for believing, that, they are
unmediated. That is to say, all experience is processed through, organized
by, and makes itself available to us in extremely complex epistemological
ways. The notion of unmediated experience seems, if not selfcontradictory, empty at best. This seems to me to be true even with regard
to the experiences of those ultimate objects of concern with which mystics
have intercourse, e.g., God, Being, nirvana, etc., and this “mediated”
aspect of all our experience seems an inescapable feature of any
epistemological inquiry, including the inquiry into mysticism. Thus,
contrary to the prevailing scholarly view—that of James, Stace, Underhill,
Otto, and even Zaehner and Smart—we must recognize that a right
understanding of mysticism is not just a question of studying the reports of
6
Ibid., 288.
the mystic after the experiential event but also of acknowledging that the
experience itself, as well as the form in which it is reported, is shaped by
concepts which the mystic brings to, and which shape, his experience.
Straightforwardly, what is argued is that, for example, the Hindu mystic
does not have an experience of x which he describes in the, to him,
familiar language and symbols of Hinduism, but rather he has a Hindu
experience; his experience is not an unmediated experience of x but is
itself the at least partially preformed anticipated Hindu experience of
Brahman. Again, the Christian mystic does not experience some
unidentified reality which he then conveniently labels “God,” but rather
has the at least partially, prefigured Christian experiences of God, or Jesus,
and so forth. Moreover, as one might anticipate, it is my contention,
based on what evidence there is, that the Hindu experience of Brahman
and the Christian experience of God are not the same.7
In sum, for Katz and the anti-primordial position, all experience, irrespective of
whether it is mystical, perennial, or esoteric, is rendered necessarily relative and less than
certain by various mediators, including personality, language, and culture.
With these two contending positions in sharp focus, it might prove interesting to
consider the extent to which they, and the conflict between them, are altered, by placing
them in the context of the evolution of consciousness.
EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The term evolution of consciousness as used here is intended to be more inclusive
than either the history of nature or the history of thought. It refers to the expression of
consciousness through both nature and mind of a prior, originating reality ordinarily
understood by a variety of terms such as Mind, Spirit, and Cosmic Intelligence. The
evolutionist rightly understands that mind evolved from nature, but according to the
theory of the evolution of consciousness here espoused, nature previously evolved from
the primal source of all. Consciousness, then, includes the fullest possible scope of
entities and events, all to be understood as manifestations of an original guiding reality.
At full value, evolution refers to the changing mode of expression of this underlying
reality, first through eons of natural evolution and then through epochs given to the
development of human awareness.
This account is deliberately quite general because it is only the background to our
primary concern, the possibility that mysticism properly belongs more to some than to
other historical periods. More specifically, and controversially, I am proposing that
mysticism belongs most properly to a mode of consciousness prior to the development of
the human ego and the conscious will, such as the modern individual, and particularly
modern Western individual, is capable of realizing. If we take seriously the changing
mode of consciousness from one epoch to the next, and the radical changes over many
epochs—for example, from the time of the Ancient Egyptians and Hebrews, to the time
7
“The ‘Conservative’ Character of Mystical Experience,” in Katz, ed., Mysticism and Religious Traditions,
4-5; the same passage appears in “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Katz, ed., Mysticism and
Philosophical Analysis, 26.
of the Greeks and early Christians, to the Renaissance and to contemporary thought and
culture—the mystic can be seen as a norm in the earlier cultures and as a rarity (indeed,
as passé) in the present.
Consequently, the value of a mystical experience depends at least in part on the
particular historical period in which the experience is attained. If the Hebrews and
Greeks could see spiritual beings, then within the interpretive frame provided by the
evolution of consciousness, the importance of Abraham and Moses, Homer and
Pythagoras, has more to do with the ways in which they advanced this evolution than
with their having contacted the timeless source of all. The Greek mystics had as their
spiritual-esoteric task the contacting of the gods who were presumably guiding that
amazing culture and, through that culture, the entire evolution of Western civilization.
The achievements not only of the Greeks but of all mystics and esoteric teachers
are quite specific, and all the more compelling and significant in their specificity.
Although the mystical experiences enjoyed by Abraham and Moses, for example, were
quite different from each other, they had in common a special and, in global terms, a
highly specific relationship to YHWH, the God of the Hebrew people. By virtue of their
source, these experiences were in a distinct spiritual stream, with a historically specific
task. Both from our own historically specific perspective, as well as from the perspective
of the individual and his community, these experiences are at least as valuable for their
specificity as for their status as mystical-esoteric experiences. In traditional cultures,
after all, experience of the divine was not so rare as to need defense or acclaim: it was
not the fact of a mystical experience that was significant, but rather its content.
Content is not only historically grounded and limited but also historically
significant and, through the historical, revelatory. But because the primordialist does not
attend to the historical in defending the mystical and esoteric, there is a tendency to miss
the specific and, therefore, the revelatory character of each mystical experience. The
following passage from the article by Huston Smith, quoted above, may serve as an
example:
Eliade tells us that for archaic societies “the world exists because it was
created by the gods, and that the existence of the world ‘means’
something, ‘wants to say’ something, that the world is neither mute nor
opaque, that it is not an inert thing without purpose or significance.” One
can quibble about the plurality in the word “gods” in that statement,—it
would be a quibble, for the alternative to monotheism is not polytheism
but dualism—but is there anything in the entire history of theology that
supercedes, let alone retires, that initial, may we say primordial,
discernment?8
Since, in the archaic world as described by Eliade, mankind really did know the
gods, it is significant to point out to such experiences as evidence of the divine in our
time. Rather, by a review within the context of the evolution of consciousness, the divine
was obvious to the ancients, somewhat questionable and hidden by the time of the
Greeks, believed rather than known by the medievals, and generally regarded as dead in
our own time. If, as this essay is attempting to demonstrate, the evolution of
8
Smith, “Philosophy, Theology, and the Primordial Claim.” 276.
consciousness is more than a history of ideas or a climate of opinion, but indeed is a
purposive change in the mode of awareness or of the possibilities and limitations of
awareness from which ideas and opinion issue, then the archaic experience of the divine
may well have been literally of the gods, whereas in our time both God and the gods, and
all other forms of the divine, are withdrawn—and purposively so.
To be a mystic in our time—when the gods of the archaic world and God of the
historical religions have “died the death of a thousand qualifications”—constitutes a far
more significant achievement than in any previous age. In the case of the contemporary
mystics, what is so important about their spirituality is not their mysticism as ordinarily
understood, but their distinctively modern, ego-, and will-based consciousness. To think
abstractly about human nature or the meaning of life is for us an ordinary experience but
was inconceivable (quite literally) for archaic humanity. The age and culture of each
mystic is telling in both senses—it reveals an achievement as well as a limitation. As we
know not to look to the Hebrews or the Chinese for metaphysics, or to the Indians for
humanistic ethics, or to the Greeks for a sense of historical providence, we ought to
observe and draw the implications from a similar set of strengths and limitations
concerning mystics and their evolutionary context.
Gautama and Jesus, Sankara and Eckhart, Suzuki and Merton—all are mystics
and all are to be prized as such. But when the experiences and reports of these figures are
studied from the perspective of evolution of consciousness, there comes into view quite
different mysticisms, and the differences between them is dependent upon (and in turn
reveals the characteristic quality of) the consciousness of their epoch.
With the help of feminist insights, Matthew Fox rightly discerns that Jesus and
other mystics exhibit feminine virtues such as gentleness, passivity, and tolerance.
Evolution of consciousness might prove similarly effective when used as an instrument of
interpretation. Jesus, for example, exhibits the kind of thinking—not merely the
thoughts, but the mode or quality of thinking itself—that is characteristic of first-century
Hebraic-Hellenistic consciousness. The experience of the Father to which Jesus
frequently referred is not only of a different culture from the mystical experiences
recorded in the Upanishads or Buddhist texts, but it is a different kind of consciousness,
of a different spiritual and mental time and purpose. The experience of Jesus is also
radically different from the experiences of contemporary mystics such as Sri Aurobindo,
Thomas Merton, or the Dalai Lama.
While primordialists do not need to be told of these differences—Huston Smith’s
Religions of Man, written thirty years ago, is full of carefully nuanced accounts of the
qualitative differences of seven major historical religions—they do need to draw out the
implications of these differences with respect to the debate for and against the possibility
of unmediated mystical experience.
Although not in a way that would make it welcome to a contextualist such as
Katz, the present account of the evolution of consciousness does nevertheless serve the
cause of those who insist that all experience is mediated. But the evolutionist position
here espoused is also at odds with the contextualist in that it regards the mediated
expression as having its source and guidance in the divine. Whereas its impatience with
anti-spiritual thinking leads the perennialist to claim too much, the anti-perennialist
allows too little and misses the deep sources and powerful revelations of mystical
experiences. Both positions might be modified and strengthened by the evolutionist
view, which sees all esoteric and mystical insight as streaming from the spiritual world
on behalf of the struggle of humanity to found a divine life on earth.
Thus, an affirmation of the evolution of consciousness counts against the claim
for unmediated mystical knowledge, but not for the same reason: the evolution of
consciousness shifts the focus from the arguments for and against unmediated mystical
experience to the claim for spiritually significant revelation according to the spiritually
guided change of consciousness from one epoch to the next. We would do well, then, to
acknowledge the weaknesses of both the primordialist and the contextualist positions.
With the primordialist, we should argue on behalf of the mystical and esoteric as the
source of true spiritual knowledge; with the contextualist, we should acknowledge that
when the mystical is translated into the conceptual, exoteric mode it loses the privileged
status of the esoteric. The evolutionist view is both contextual—every mystical
experience and religious claim is limited by the language, personality, and culture of the
mystic—and absolute—the experience itself does contact or draw from an ineffable
spiritual source.
If there was a time when mysticism was automatic and unopposed, it is also true
that in the present age mysticism is so difficult and rare that the majority of the
population doubts its significance, and segments of the thinking population doubt it is a
possibility. The term modern is more obviously associated with the skepticism of Katz
than with the esotericism of Smith (whose book on the primordial tradition is rightly
entitled Forgotten Truth and for whom Katz and his critical perspective is a typical
example of the anti-metaphysical, anti-ontological character of modern philosophical and
religious thinking).
In the concluding section of this paper, I will switch to a more personal tone and
recommend a modern spiritual cognition that I believe both blunts the debate between the
mystical-esoteric position and the reigning cultural relativism and affirms what seems to
me most valuable in both of these positions.
TOWARD A MODERN SPIRITUAL COGNITION
The method of spiritual cognition that I would recommend is the spiritual science
taught by Rudolf Steiner and developed by, among others, Owen Barfield and Georg
Kuhlewind. On the basis of the theory and practice of this method, it seems to me
possible to bridge, or to hold in creative polar tension, the exoteric and esoteric, the
cultural and mystical, the perennial and the temporally particular. Further, this spiritualscientific method claims to be modern—that is, appropriate for the distinctive mode of
consciousness that has developed during the last several centuries of the scientific West.
Since our modern consciousness (understood as characterized by a scientific method and
criteria for knowledge and value) has put the spiritual at least on the defensive (if it has
not entirely removed it from serious consideration), a mysticism that could develop
according to its presuppositions will have to be historical and scientific, conscious and
willful.
Advocates of mysticism, however, do not seem to think in terms of spiritual or
esoteric experiences attained by a method or affirmed by criteria characteristic of modern
Western consciousness. A personal experience and observation might be helpful in this
regard. During the seminar on mysticism that generated this essay (and many other
positive results), a colleague and friend presented his book to me with this inscription:
“For the mystic in you which I do recognize even though, as yet, you do not.” This
affirmation of the mystic in me (by one who, it seems to me, is experienced and
discerning in such matters) followed by several days my reacting uncomfortably to
seminar participants who politely insisted that I was as much a mystic as they and that I
should admit as much. My resistance to the designation “mystic” issues not from an antireligious or anti-spiritual perspective, but rather from a specific commitment to an
evolutionary view according to which I regard mysticism as a dated ideal.
According to my theoretical understanding of mysticism and the evolution of
consciousness, mysticism is no longer the ideal attainment; indeed, it is a bit of an
anachronism. On the experiential side, however, I not only am not past mysticism to the
next ideal—I am not even to mysticism. So, my objection to being classified as a mystic
is two-fold: I have not attained a mystical consciousness, nor am I striving to. Rather, I
am striving to attain a level of consciousness that should properly be called higher
cognition or imaginal thinking. Hence the point of this essay—that in the evolution of
consciousness, mysticism should be seen as the penultimate rather than ultimate spiritual
attainment, and that even those of us who are not yet mystics should strive for the
ultimate—higher cognition or imaginal thinking—rather than for mystical union.
NOTES
1.
Huston Smith, “Philosophy, Theology, and the Primordial Claim,” Cross Currents (Fall 1988): 27688.
2. Stephen T. Katz, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978) and Mysticism and Religious Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
3. See especially Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1969), chapter 5;
Stewart C. Easton, Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy (New York: Anthroposophic Press,
1975), chapter 2; and Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1987), and History, Guilt and Habit (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1979).
4. Published by Harper & Row in 1977.
5. Smith, “Philosophy, Theology, and the Primordial Claim,” 276.
6. Ibid., 288.
7. “The ‘Conservative’ Character of Mystical Experience,” in Katz, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical
Analysis, 26.
8. Smith, “Philosophy, Theology, and the Primordial Claim,” 276.
9. Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
10. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (New York: Anthroposophic Press,
1947); Owen Barfield, Rediscovery of Meaning (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1977); Georg Kuhlewind, Stages of Consciousness (West Stockbridge, Mass.: Lindisfarne Press,
1984).