Defining mystical experience : an analysis of issues in the typology of momentary and concrete religious experiences

This essay is concerned with the taxonomy of that kind of experience referred to by Trevor. Despite Stace and others, we have as yet no incontrovertible way of deciding whether and on what basis mystical experiences can be constructed as constituting a type and, without knowing this, cannot be certain what our data base encompasses or what kind of approach is indicated. My philosophical analysis of various aspects of the experience presented in mystical reports, I aim to produce a characterisation that the data supports and one which is corrigible.

My definition of a mystical type is unconventional largely because I give little role to mystical claims in the characterisation of the experience. The reasons for this are examined in chapters 1 and 2 where I argue that these claims are not meaningful and, in any event, are inaccessible to rational analysis. However, if I note the content of these claims, I do identify certain features about them, notably the concreteness and apparent reality of mystical experience, which could prove to be a basis for typology. Justifying the selection of this feature as distinguishing and defining leads, in chapter 3, to an epistemological debate in which I argue that mentalistic models cannot be explain this feature in the case of mystical perception or indeed perception more generally. Believing concreteness to have a hypothetical importance, I turn away from the sociology of mysticism and, in chapters 4 and 5, find that we can give our subject matter distinctive definition and context by relating it to cyclic and syndromic change in personality which occur in the context of traumatisation. Mystical perception here is defined by its circumstances - a curious sequence in psycho-physiological functioning - and by its sensory or quasi-sensory nature. In chapter 6 I look further into physiology, unsuccessfully, for empirical confirmation of this picture.

In conclusion, I explore and answer some of the questions a type, defined in terms of the essentially empirical world of human functioning, poses us. This is not a reductionist account but, this is because my primary aim is giving typology a corrigible basis and only the former aspects of the experience allow this.