Michael Daniels has
succeeded in writing a thoroughly mulled mead hoping to inform if not enliven a
sophisticated reader’s appreciation of so-called mysticism by synthetically
reconsidering papers published from 1988 to 2003, all but one from 1997.  Given
the reader’s orientation he will find fault here and there, as a reviewer does
for completeness, something a critical scholar like Daniels surely invites.  I
review the book under three sections seeking to show that what seems
academically dense could reduce to what a child might understand.

Strengths

The first three points
rest on Daniels’s complex and convolutedly-stated agnosticism.  On a
range from 0 to 10, with  5, agnosticism, dead in the middle between
adiaphorism/atheism and theism, he runs from 2 or 3 to at least 9, as witnessed
by his use of the theurgic upper-case.  For example, mysticism, p. 235, is
"the individual’s direct experience of a relationship to a
fundamental Reality."  Compare the excellent parallel proposal for
atheism, 280, as "denial of the existence of a deity."  No
upper case; no theo-committed the.  I hope I err that he supports the
"more fundamentalist . . . less fashionable" view, 90:  "God and
Devil exist in their own right, and not just as archetypal images. . . ." 
Most defintions paint atheists as obstinately refusing to acknowledge what’s
undoubtedly out there or in here.  He confirms Jung, 89, as viewing any deity
and so-called evil non-theistically, i.e., as psychic and not transcendentally
knowable realities.  Very nice charts, imported or modified–180, 186, 194,
206– illustrate theorists’ views of mystical man in the larger world.  A
useful list, 165-73, of so-described soul-experiences actually ends up as a
nice summary of the book, with an Erasmian sense of wordplay producing many
categories that refer to the "same" indeterminable experience, thus
exposing his empirical, not experiential, rationalist, and eminently realist,
commitment.  Yet, 216, he supports the Erasmian critique of word-smuggling.  I
could mention many more highlights–detailed indexes, adequate references, a
38-page glossary–in a flowful, synthetic work written with Ciceronian
stylistic balance and usually argued with scholarly cogency, even in the
Kantianly moralistic fifth chapter on what some call evil that seems to reduce
to (our) bourgeois fear of mugging.  The charm of the preface’s personal
journey, 1-4, we need more of suggests a parallel-universe struggle between, on
the one hand, his early occultism and, on the other, a dragged-to-church
distate for religion and a scientism curiously devoid of his or anyone’s direct
phenomenological experience.  I note that no single person’s landscapinging of
their, or even his, mystical experience shows forth, except for Bucke’s, 18,
backhanded self-reference over a century and a third old when he and friends in
England read current British poets and especially our Whitman.  During a long
post-midnight ride in a hansom he, in peace from the "ideas, images and
emotions" of the evening (Bucke, unpaginated 3-4 from Acklom’s "The
Man and the Book") "found himself wrapped around . . . by a
flame-coloured cloud [as if from] some sudden conflagration in the great city
[realizing that] the light was within himself."  The virtual absence of
any direct record of personal experience in the book underscores what the
sociologist C. Wright Mills called "abstracted empiricism."  Though
Mills had survey research specifically in mind, Daniels illustrates similar
problems when he says, 58, "Let us consider a concrete example." 
What follows presents no concrete instance of any person’s experience of
so-called near-death experience, NDE.  Words like "typically,"
"may," "such" reveal a pastiche of abstract, general
typification.  As his example of psi gives rise to the issue of just
what a mystical experience is, I offer my view less broad than that of
Daniels:  the spontaneous occurrence, often after frustrated searching below
awareness, of expanded, interconnective coming together within the person as
the quintessence (Austin); systematic meditative pursuit, along
flame-self-extinguishing-nirvana lines, in a tradition of discipline, e.g.,
Zen; so-called psychic awareness beyond one’s integumentary envelope of, say,
blips of light and cold spots.  Daniels includes the last; I do not.

Problems

Page 10 of the preface
introduces the book’s core, charted on pages 254-5, more fully discussed in
nearby pages, as a row-and-column 5 X 5 array of 10 items–theistic, nature,
social, mental, and monistic against numinous, dialogic, synergic, unitive, and
nondual–to produce 25 cells.  Any array, when generating cells at the
intersection of Y and (under) X, so to speak, produces meaningless, i.e., only
logical but not practical, cells.  So from what the words must mean I knock out
the whole line theistic as without  palpable substance, leaving 20
cells.  I conclude unitive and nondual , 189, represent little
more than a single empirical area of experience, like the first two senses of
mystical experience above.  15 cells left.  Synergic, working together,
coalesces with social, possibly overlapping with some of dialogic,
perhaps the whole better to be listed as collective.  That could leave
fewer than 10 cells.  As Daniels views numen theistically, a few more
cells may drop.  Analyzing the terms of the charts might give me pause, or I
might find more cells to knock out, thus reducing the 25 to 5 or fewer.  So,
Daniels’ realist proliferation:  creating the impression that by
multiplying word/phrase tags you have correlatively multiplied palpable
things.  Regarding, 268, the spiral-dynamic, as in a bedspring/torus or
the Slinky that walks down the stairs image, versus the structural-hierarchical,
ladder, a third alternative crops up:  a non-progressive, changing-manifold
conception of transpersonal development.  Imagine a big cigar smoke ring slowly
rolled out in front of the mouth.  Rings of varying size can be blown through
the first at varying velocities to produce, if you will, vases of varying
shapes composed of the rings in relation to each other.  There is no beginning
or end, priority or superiority, as with either a spiral or a ladder view:  a
spiral Slinky always has a beginning and end of the winding flat wire and a
ladder has a beginning, middle, and end.  Unitive, 258, becomes a
problematic term in the contexts in which it applies:  sensed separated parts
of our experience, as of what we call the body, become connected, whole, as in
the emotional blush of mystical experience.  Using the term in the sense of
relating ourselves to some presumed theurgic entity just diminishes us.  A
series of terms, not all of which Daniels uses–spirit, anim-us/-a, phren-,
psyche–all revolve around the simple yet profound process of breathing and the
emotion it implies.  I recall my first classical Greek teacher saying that for
the Greeks the mind was in the chest; emotion percolates into cognitive
content.  It seems to me that Western religious bureaucracies teased out that
ideal and seemingly non-physical soul to be controlled, as the sociologist Max
Weber would put it, through psychic coercion by religious virtuosos.  We all
profit from studying Onians on these concepts.  Similarly, 198, Daniels
deprecates the physical as gross.  Finally, despite his dissertation on Maslow,
Daniels doesn’t seem to notice that a scan of Bucke’s cosmic-consciousness
concept reveals many ideas that with just a slight twist become elements of
Maslow’s B-motivation and peak-experiencing.

Gaffes

Numen, 300, has no relation
to deities in Latin.  The primitive meaning speaks of political power, as when
a chief "nods" to give assent, like Brynner’s "So let it be
written; so let it be done," a meaning that carries over into later
quasi-religious senses, 245.  The definition, 305, of psychosurgery is a
misapprehension for trephaning as used since prehistoric times to cut
holes in the skull to let out what we deem mental illness.  Psychosurgery can
be done anywhere in the body, without tools, producing guts in the form of
masses of cassette tape and chicken blood to relieve the patient of
psycho-somatic illness.  Michael Harner’s work on South-American shamans shows
how they may "palm" a splinter in the mouth and "suck" it
out of the sufferer. The Greek daimon, 284-5, causes confusion as
d(a)emon, as if referring to a palpable being.  It translates best as Socrates’
inner voice, capacity, or power, often the insightful synthesizing power of the
right brain, similar to traditional notions of genius and charisma. 
The neologistic heterarchy along with hierarchy, 290, are neither
contraries nor contradictories.  Hierachy means "the holy place is
first," showing religious organization as the historical antecedent of
bureaucracy.  From the Greek heterarchy would mean "the other is
first," thus being the very opposite of the transpersonalists’ meaning of
egalitarianism.  Table 7, top, 86, opposes his ecstasy and falsly
neologistically created enstasy , in fact the same, the former better
viewed as expansion out beyond one’s usual sense of envelope from within rather
than some psychological standing outside oneself as a clone.  Compare Oprah’s
foolishly conceived non-contraries, history versus herstory, two words
containing no "story" but, instead, the Greek element histor- for
"investigation."  Daniels imbues an apotheosized Kosmos, 202, with
what he calls mind and spirit versus Cosmos which he conceives as the physical
universe, the only kind there can be, although for the Greeks the latter
implied order versus chaos.  

Finally, when discussing
mysticism I select from a list of some three dozen strictures I’ve created
those that apply.  The following come up as I reexperience Daniels’
weltanschauung.

Mystical experience:

–is other than the words attached to it.

–doesn’t require
untenable distinctions like intro-/exta-vertive, eso-/exo-teric.

–isn’t philosophy; is
neither logic nor anti-logic, but "para-logic," paradoxical.

–isn’t different from
science, involves all that testing, rejection, and refinement that only
brother/sister mystics/scientists can understand, expressing itself in cultural
images and language without the universality of scientific-mathematical
language and methodological ideology.

–is postively
life-transformative, never risky or negative as unitive experience, though the
road to it may be quite difficult, as Daniels reminds us.

–doesn’t require
ego-/self-lessness; the self endures "absorbed."  Daniels mostly
agrees, 51, but says the self is suspended, not lost.  It can never be lost,
isn’t suspended; anything to which the self may refer is expanded outward from
its center.  Children may be there all the time, but we humor ourselves as
adults, 261, imagining we experience mystical expansiveness in a more
sophisticated way.

–doesn’t involve loss
of obective-subjective as if such a stance must be rescued for fear that a
scientist might get lost in experience, even though experience and
experiment are the same empirical word.

–is not
un-/super-natural or anti-naturalistic and is neither faith nor belief nor
mysterious.

–is ordinary, not rare
or "in addition," much of which Daniels agrees with, just infrequent,
not alter-ed/-nate consciousness/reality, just "variant."

Nothing could be more
misconceived than to conclude from the range of strictures I have lodged than
that my evaluation of this book is other than highly positive.  Many an
excellent book of essays covering a field has gained renown as a handbook and a
market-expanding  publisher would have done well to use that honorific term in
the subtitle for essays.

 

References

Austin, James, H.  Zen-Brain Reflections.   
Cambridge, MA:  MIT, 2006.  Reviewed in Metapsychology on Sept. 12, 2006, Vol. 10, No. 37

Bucke, Richard Maurice, M.D.  Cosmic
Consciousness.  New York:  Dutton, 1969; 1901, Innes.

Onians, Richard B.  The Origins of European
Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the  World [,] Time, and Fate.  Cambridge [U.K.]:  Cambridge, 1951.

 

© 2006 A. P. Bober

 

A.P. Bober has studied a psychology
spanning Skinner and a humanistic-clinical view based on existential phenomenology
and had been a PhD candidate in a substantive yet philosophic European-based
sociology including the "critical" view.  His teaching augmented
courses in group theory/"small-group developmental dynamics" (lab)
while introducing "sociology of knowledge" and "issues in
biological anthropology," with publications in the first two fields. 
Currently he is writing a book on mystical experience as metaphorically tied to
neurophysiology.

Categories: General