Mysticism, Science

Mysticism and science are more closely related to each other than either is to philosophy. Here I take philosophy in its modern sense—largely engaged in dealing with pure concepts or even simply with grammar and semantics. Both mysticism and science are grounded in experience, the one in the exploration and understanding of transcending realities, the other in examining the physical. Both, of course, have marginal or pseudo forms. In mysticism that manifests as speculation about experience not personally lived; in the other as mathematical science in which any relationship to reality is, at best, produced by instrument readings. Mysticism is rare, science common; the reason for this is that those who have actually experienced the transcending are very few in number; those who have access to matter are many. Herewith two quotes from Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi concerning the mystics:

We deny the right to the Peripatetics [Aristotelians] to speak about the forms and realities which become visible to the visionary contemplatives, for what is in question is a path which scarcely any of them has followed and even in those very few cases the mystical experience remained weak and precarious. The follower of the mystical path who has received his initiation from a master with theosophical experience, or thanks to the special divine assistance which guides the solitary exile—the latter case being very rare—will fully understand that the Peripatetics have entirely overlooked two sublime universes which never figure in their discussions, and there are a number of other things that remain beyond the scope of their philosophy.

…In short, the theosophist who has truly attained to mystical experience is one whose material body becomes like a tunic which he sometimes casts off and at other times puts on. No man can be numbered among the mystical theosophists so long as he has no knowledge of the most holy leaven of mystical wisdom, and so long as he has not experienced this casting off and this putting on.*

A parallel critique of mathematical science is provided by the physicist David Bohm. I’ve quoted this segment before elsewhere. It bears repeating in this context:

All that is clear about the quantum theory is that it contains an algorithm for computing the probabilities of experimental results. But it gives no physical account of individual quantum processes. Indeed, without the measuring instruments in which the predicted results appear, the equations of the quantum theory would be just pure mathematics that would have no physical meaning at all. And thus quantum theory merely gives us (generally statistical) knowledge of how our instruments will function. And from this we can make inferences that contribute to our knowledge, for example, of how to carry out various technical processes….

It follows from this that quantum mechanics can say little or nothing about reality itself. In philosophical terminology, it does not give what can be called an ontology for a quantum system. Ontology is concerned primarily with that which is and only secondarily with how we obtain our knowledge about this.†

The reason why science rules and mysticism is relegated to the category of the airy-fairy is not because one produces truth and the other fantasy. They both produce genuine observations of reality. The decisive reason is that in a collective, social setting, common knowledge must be accessible to the commonality of the population. But transcending experience is only available to the few; the rest must believe. The truth of the mystical, however, is at least indirectly substantiated by the majority of humans who do believe and adhere to one or another of the world’s religions. They have an intuition that the mystics “have something.” And that intuition, of course, comes from the same river the few have actually followed closer to its source.

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*Suhrawardi in Book of Conversations, quoted in Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Bollingen, 1977, p. 124.

†Bohm, David and B.J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe, Routlege, 1993, p. 1-2.