Participation and the Mystery by Ferrer Jorge N.;

Author:Ferrer, Jorge N.; [Ferrer, Jorge N.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438464879
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I situated Grof’s consciousness research in the context of the modern study of mysticism. On the one hand, Grof’s findings hold the promise to settle one of the most controversial issues disputed by scholars of mysticism for the last three decades—the question of mediation in spiritual knowledge. Specifically, Grof’s (1985, 1988a, 1998) research provides extensive evidence that individuals can not only access but also understand spiritual experiences, meanings, and symbols belonging to a variety of religious traditions even without previous exposure to them. This empirical finding, if appropriately corroborated, refutes the contextualist strong thesis of mediation, according to which spiritual experience and knowledge are always necessarily mediated by doctrinal beliefs, intentional practices, and soteriological expectations.

On the other hand, Grof (1998, 2013) suggested that the experiential data gathered during his fifty-year consciousness research support the idea of a perennial philosophy—more specifically, a neo-Advaitin, esotericist-perspectival type of perennialism. According to Grof (1998), all religious traditions, at their core, aim at the realization of an Absolute Consciousness that, being identical in essence to human individual consciousness, brings forth an ultimately illusory material world through a process of restriction or involution. The diverse spiritual ultimates espoused by the various religious traditions (e.g., sunyata, God, the Tao, kaivalyam, Brahman) are simply different ways to name and experience this Absolute Consciousness.

While I argued against this perennialist interpretation, I am not saying that the perennial philosophy cannot find support in Grof’s data, or that Grof’s research disconfirms perennialist metaphysics. As Grof (1998) showed, the psychedelic evidence can be interpreted in ways that are consistent with perennialism (although, I have argued, inconsistent with textual and phenomenological mystical evidence). This should not come as a surprise. In the same way that alternative or even logically incompatible theories can fit all possible evidence—as the Duhem-Quine principle of underdetermination of theory by evidence shows (Duhem, 1954/1991; Quine, 1953/1980)—it is very likely that alternative metaphysical systems could fit all possible experiences. What I suggest, in contrast, is that Grof’s (1975, 1988a, 1998) empirical findings are also consistent with a more pluralist participatory vision of human spirituality that is free from the limitations of perennialist thinking.17 In other words, given the many problems afflicting perennialism, Grof’s (1998, 2013) appeal to perennialism as the metaphysical framework to organize his experiential data may have been premature. In addition, I propose that a participatory account of Grof’s data engenders a richer, more pluralistic, and arguably more spiritually emancipatory understanding of Grof’s revolutionary findings.18

Once the dependence on objectivist and essentialist metaphysics is given up, the various spiritual paths can no longer be seen either as purely human constructions (as contextualism proposes) or as concurrently aimed at a single, pregiven spiritual reality (as perennialism believes). The various spiritual traditions, in contrast, can be better seen as vehicles for the participatory enaction of different subtle worlds, spiritual ultimates, and transconceptual disclosures of reality. In a participatory cosmos, human multidimensional cognition creatively channels and modulates the mystery’s self-disclosing through the bringing forth of subtle worlds and spiritual realities—including transformative enactions of the physical or “natural” world.

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