Non-conceptual is what 'the direct path' is about, and of course we can't 'make sense' of it, because to make sense of it, is to try and process it in the verbal-symbolic part of the mind. It takes doing. — Wayfarer

What can I say? I'm skeptical. It sounds like someone saying that they saw a round square in their dreams. Feeling and sensation can be nonconceptual. I get that. But I could ask you what you could possibly be thinking of here beyond feeling and sensation and by definition you couldn't tell me. And couldn't, in fact, know (at least not conceptually.) It looks like an empty negation.

Yes, I laughed too! Like a laughing Bhudda, indeed I laughed for years, but I had to restrain myself to avoid cramp, or lock jaw;)

Indeed, it's impossible to compare our experiences when these are (by the very definition of Wittgenstein's mysticism) beyond words. And in that way it's 'unfalsifiable', if you will. But I allow room for revelation in the way I think about knowledge, so I'm ok with that.

Thanks for the link, I will definitely read this!

Old title but (like the title) a perennial.

There is experiential learning and knowing, in which the mind is a bystander looking on.
You know the laughing thing, well it's the same with art, suddenly everything is art and you have to restructure what art means from a position of knowledge, aware of the futile struggling you were doing before the revelation, veiled in ignorance.

The mystical revelation is like this, one sees what is revealed, it has meaning, alters and adds to your being. There are square circles by the way(chuckle).

But I could ask you what you could possibly be thinking of here beyond feeling and sensation and by definition you couldn't tell me. And couldn't, in fact, know (at least not conceptually.) It looks like an empty negation. — Hoo

That's a fair question so I'll stop being facetious and try and explain it.

The problem is going to be that to try and explain it, I will have to appeal to some kind of framework. And I'm afraid that isn't going to be philosophy, per se.

So, one system which does talk in terms of all of the components of experience, including, but not limited to, feeling and sensation is the Buddhist abhidhamma. That is a system of philosophical psychology that is part of the Buddhist corpus. It is a hard system to summarise, but the key point is that it analyses the various components of experience in terms of what is called 'skandhas' - heaps or aggregates:

The Buddhist teachings in the Pali Canon describe the five aggregates as follows:

"form" or "matter"[a] (Skt., Pāli रूप rūpa;): matter, body or "material form" of a being or any existence.[5][21] Buddhist texts state rupa of any person, sentient being and object to be composed of four basic elements or forces, that is earth (solidity), water (cohesion), fire (heat) and wind (motion).[3]

"sensation" or "feeling" (Skt., Pāli वेदना vedanā): sensory experience of an object.[21] It is either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

"perception" (Skt. संज्ञा saṃjñā, Pāli सञ्ञा saññā,): sensory and mental process that registers, recognizes and labels (for instance, the shape of a tree, color green, emotion of fear).[21]

"mental formations", "constructing activities",[21] "conditioned things", "volition", "karmic activities" (Skt. संस्कार saṃskāra, Pāli सङ्खार saṅkhāra,): all types of mental imprints and conditioning triggered by an object.[22][23][d] This skandha includes any process that makes a person initiate action or act.[21]

"consciousness", "discrimination" or "discernment"[e] (Skt. विज्ञान vijñāna, Pāli विञ्ञाण viññāṇa,): This includes, states Peter Harvey, awareness of an object and discrimination of its components and aspects, and is of six types.[21] The Buddhist literature discusses this skandha as,
In the Nikayas/Āgamas: cognizance,[24][f] that which discerns[25][g]
In the Abhidhamma: a series of rapidly changing interconnected discrete acts of cognizance.[h]
In some Mahayana sources: the base that supports all experience. — Wikipedia

So in this system, feeling and sensation are classified under 'vedana'.

Now you might ask, is there anything beyond 'feeing and sensation'. The technical answer is: there is not anything 'beyond' it, but there is 'stopping'. 'Stopping' is the cessation of the activities of the skandhas so as to see their 'empty nature' (śūnyatā) - hence why in Mahayana Buddhism, the aim of the practice is described as 'realising emptiness'.

So realising emptiness is not actually itself a matter of feeling or conceptualisation. It is more a matter of understanding how the processes, the 'five heaps', give rise to our sense of ourselves, how together they constitute the sense of 'this is me, this is mine'. So through meditative absorption, dhyana, one penetrates the 'chain of dependent origination' and in that sense 'goes beyond' or 'sees through' the illusion of separate existence.

So that is indeed 'negation' in one sense, in that śūnyatā can only be described in negative terms as being 'not the aggregates, nor anything else'. But that connotes the inneffable nature of realisation. But this realisation is, as I mentioned before, 'noetic' (in the Platonist idiom) although the corresponding Buddhist term is probably Prajñāpāramitā, meaning 'transcendent wisdom', signified in Mahayana iconography in similar form to the Gnostic 'Sophia', specifically, as a female deity, who is 'personification of wisdom':


Goddess Prajñāpāramitā, from Sumatra


Traditional depiction of Sophia, 'spirit of Wisdom'.

Note that the deity is sitting upon the thousand petal lotus representing the activated crown chakra.

The first time I realised this was when I was reading The Inner Citadel and Plotinus, or The Simplicity of Vision by Pierre Hadot. — WhiskeyWhiskers

Surprisingly, reading Hadot had the opposite effect on me. It seems to me that Hadot does note the similarities, but more importantly also the differences between different philosophies. And where he ended up quite approving of Stoicisim/Epicureanism - he was quite critical of the Plotinian flight from this world. It's been quite a bit since I last read him though...

So realising emptiness is not actually itself a matter of feeling or conceptualisation. It is more a matter of understanding how the processes, the 'five heaps', give rise to our sense of ourselves, how together they constitute the sense of 'this is me, this is mine'. So through meditative absorption, dhyana, one penetrates the 'chain of dependent origination' and in that sense 'goes beyond' or 'sees through' the illusion of separate existence. — Wayfarer

You mention "understanding," which I associate with the conceptual. There's a conceptual "seeing through" of separate existence in Hegel and an emotional or felt "seeing" through of human separateness in Schopenhauer and in Schrodinger above. "Realizing emptiness" is something I associate with "all is vanity / everything is empty" in Ecclesiastes, which I think can be interpreted as the bonfire of the vanities or idols or masks/identifications of the ego. I like all of these themes very much, but I don't see how you can explain a non-conceptual revelation that isn't feeling or sensation. You can (seems to me) only paste more words on an empty negation, but as soon as you get metaphorical, you're in the realm of myth and concept.

Now you might ask, is there anything beyond 'feeing and sensation'. The technical answer is: there is not anything 'beyond' it, but there is 'stopping'. 'Stopping' is the cessation of the activities of the skandhas so as to see their 'empty nature' (śūnyatā) - hence why in Mahayana Buddhism, the aim of the practice is described as 'realising emptiness'. — Wayfarer

It sounds like you are talking about stopping thinking in order to understand ("see") something about thinking. For me, this does not compute. But I obviously think that thinking about thinking can lead to a perception of "nothingness" or the emptiness of masks. However, we are attached to these masks or illusions, so that's where (in my view) desire enters the picture. For me the illusions are impossible hopes, inconsistent conceptions.

Love stories, however inadequate as theories of love, are nonetheless stories, logoi, items that admit of analysis. But because they are manifestations of our loves, not mere cool bits of theorizing, we—our deepest feelings—are invested in them. They are therefore tailor-made, in one way at least, to satisfy the Socratic sincerity condition, the demand that you say what you believe (Crito 49c11-d2, Protagoras 331c4-d1). Under the cool gaze of the elenctic eye, they are tested for consistency with other beliefs that lie just outside love’s controlling and often distorting ambit. Under such testing, a lover may be forced to say with Agathon, “I didn’t know what I was talking about in that story” (201b11–12). The love that expressed itself in his love story meets then another love: his rational desire for consistency and intelligibility; his desire to be able to tell and live a coherent story; his desire—to put it the other way around—not to be endlessly frustrated and conflicted, because he is repetitively trying to live out an incoherent love story. — stanford

I think Sophia is female for reason. The phallus can be interpreted symbolically as a dogmatic assertion, law, or tradition and therefore as an "alienated" crystallization of the self's virtue outside of and above the bodily self in the world. Sophia is beyond or before such alienation.

You and I may not agree on the details; but I think we would agree that much (or even most) of modern philosophy is seriously one-sided and lacking real significance for human life. I'm coming more and more to think that Hegel has been misappropriated by the Post moderns and that much of their own more or less arbitrary fossicking in the tradition seems to, on the basis of nothing more than merely fashionable 'modern' prejudices ' throw the baby out with the bathwater'. — John

I largely agree with that. For me I found Barfield's book as a convincing argument that (1) there are things in the world not amenable to being reduced to physics, (2) that consciousness changes and evolves - it governs the way we feel and perceive the world, (3) primitive people are not our inferiors, they just had a different consciousness, (4) our consciousness plays an active role in creating the world we experience. These insights were further refined for me by writers such as Mircea Eliade, or Eric Voegelin who unveil how much we have lost through this "modern" change in consciousness that has occurred.

I haven't read much of Eliade; but I have read quite a bit of, and about, Voegelin several years ago now. I don't agree with his characterization of Hegel and the Gnostics, or the thinking that lies behind his catch-cry "don't immanentize the eschaton".

I don't see the modern change in consciousness as necessarily a loss; in fact it should be a gain. It would be a gain if it incorporated, instead of rejecting, the previous shapes of consciousness. This is Hegel's point, and the point that much of modern philosophy has neglected.

It sounds like you are talking about stopping thinking in order to understand ("see") something about thinking. For me, this does not compute. — Hoo

That's why it's called 'mystical'! X-)

I don't agree with his characterization of Hegel and the Gnostics — John

Ok can you unpack this? Along what lines don't you agree with his characterisation of Hegel and the Gnostics?

I don't see the modern change in consciousness as necessarily a loss; in fact it should be a gain. It would be a gain if it incorporated, instead of rejecting, the previous shapes of consciousness. This is Hegel's point, and the point that much of modern philosophy has neglected. — John

This only holds if Hegel is right and history has direction. But what if, as Voegelin outlines especially in his late Ecumenical Age, history has neither direction nor finality? Then we're back to Plato and what he thought - identifying patterns that emerge, appear, disappear, and re-emerge in human consciousness. Possibilities in consciousness which always exist.

Voegelin, if I remember right, believes that the transcendent God cannot be known, which is contra the Gnostics and the whole Hermetic and Theosophical traditions, the whole tradition that I believe Hegel's philosophy reflects. Hegel believed in an evolution of spirit, and this is just what Voegelin rejects. He wants to adhere to the Orthodoxy of the religious institutions, which would keep God well away from the reach of man. I think this is absurd; God can either be experienced or else must be nothing to us.

I also believe there is a logical, reflecting a spiritual, trajectory to history. But, in any case, this is not the sort of thing that can be properly argued for or against; you either see it, and are thus convinced, or you don't. For me the same goes for God, and the spiritual dimension.

Voegelin, if I remember right, believes that the transcendent God cannot be known, which is contra the Gnostics and the whole Hermetic and Theosophical traditions — John

You have to be careful here. There is a tradition of mysticism in Christianity and this is different than Gnosticism. Voegelin is very sympathetic with this tradition - as he is with many of the Platonists, and their direct experience of spiritual realities. Even people like St. Thomas Aquinas were mystics in the end - St. Thomas Aquinas reputedly said towards the end of his life after having a religious experience that everything he has written is like straw - that's why he left his Summa unfinished. But yes - knowledge of the transcendent - Voegelin would be against that. He wouldn't be against experience of the transcendent. But man must not forget his creatureliness - he cannot KNOW the transcendent - surely he can experience it, but to claim knowledge (and hence mastery) of it is absurd. Because the transcendent is always transcendent - to know it, would mean to make it object. And that is just what is impossible, and the same mistake I believe Hegel makes via the absolute knowledge. This obviously leads to disorder - if I claim I know the transcendent, soon I will claim that whatever I want is right and truthful because I know and you don't - because you don't have the same experience I do. Voegelin was against this - he was against this sort of dangerous dogmatism which is immune from rational criticism and hides behind "secret knowledge" that only it has access to.

He wants to adhere to the Orthodoxy of the religious institutions, which would keep God well away from the reach of man. — John

The same Voegelin who frequently expressed the opinion that the Book of Revelation shouldn't be part of the Bible, and who thought that St. Paul may have been a gnostic? :P There is something different Voegelin wants. He wants to adhere to order - not to Orthodoxy or dogma. Order both in society and in the soul, and he rightfully notes that this requires adherence to certain structures and practices. Mysticism and experience of the transcendent is very good - but order is also necessary. The problem with the Gnostics is that their vision and their pursuit of it would tear society apart - the centre would not hold. It's not that they wanted to experience the spiritual directly - that wasn't the problem.

Voegelin transcends the label of conservative. Yes he would agree with conservative ideals by and large. But he is also critical of many conservative practices and dogmatisms. That's why he could never understand why Russell Kirk liked him so much.

But, in any case, this is not the sort of thing that can be properly argued for or against; you either see it, and are thus convinced, or you don't. For me the same goes for God, and the spiritual dimension. — John

See this I believe is what Voegelin attempts to criticise, because at this point I can't contradict you. We cannot engage in rational conversation to find out the truth at this point, because there is no ground for it left. I can say you're wrong, but it will be my opinion against yours. We can't be engaged in dialogue which would be conducive to resolving this and getting closer to truth because the ground of your opinion is something which is inaccessible to some people.

That's why it's called 'mystical'! X-)[/quote]
But that's also why we have words like "mystification."

Can you name some of the mystics you are referring to here? If St Thomas cast aside the Summa on the basis of a mystical experience, then we may conclude that he would have come to a place where he would have disagreed with Voegelin.

And I haven't said anything about knowing or experiencing the transcendent, because both notions are incoherent. There is no transcendent apart from the immanent, and that is precisely Hegel's point.

Can you name some of the mystics you are referring to here? If St Thomas cast aside the Summa on the basis of a mystical experience, then we may conclude that he would have come to a place where he would have disagreed with Voegelin. — John

Why do you think he would have disagreed with Voegelin?

Can you name some of the mystics you are referring to here? — John

Bodin, Pseudo-Diyonisus (who by the way was the biggest influence on St. Thomas after [well, before chronologically speaking] Aristotle), Eckhart. These are some of the names that come to mind. Voegelin also expressed respect for Bergson if he counts.

And I haven't said anything about knowing or experiencing the transcendent, because both notions are incoherent. There is no transcendent apart from the immanent, and that is precisely Hegel's point. — John

Well it is precisely Voegelin's point that there is something which cannot be known - which will forever exceed the human grasp, even though it can be experienced and encountered, but it can never become object - the known.

Right. But in all seriousness, it is a discipline, and it does have roadmaps and routes, even though from the outside it seems like complete anarchy. I often refer to this Amazon reader comment on one of Huston Smith's books: 'Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World's Religons', which summarizes it as follows:

Essentially it is this: there are "levels of being" such that the more real is also the more valuable; these levels appear in both the "external" and the "internal" worlds, "higher" levels of reality without corresponding to "deeper" levels of reality within. On the very lowest level is the material/physical world, which depends for its existence on the higher levels. On the very highest/deepest level is the Infinite or Absolute -- that is, God.

Basically this volume is an attempt to recover this view of reality from materialism, scientism, and "postmodernism." It does not attempt to adjudicate among religions (or philosophies), it does not spell out any of the important _differences_ between world faiths, and it is not intended to substitute a "new" religion for the specific faiths which already exist.

Nor should any such project be expected from a work that expressly focuses on what religions have in common. Far from showing that all religions are somehow "the same," Smith in fact shows that religions have a "common" core only at a sufficiently general level. What he shows, therefore, is not that there is really just one religion, but that the various religions of the world are actually agreeing _and_ disagreeing about something real, something about which there is an objective matter of fact, on the fundamentals of which most religions tend to concur while differing in numerous points of detail (including practice).

Of course any two religions therefore have much more in common than any single religion has with "materialism". In fact one way to state the "common core" of the world's religions is simply to say that they agree about the falsehood of "materialism."

So, look again at that chart I posted a few pages back. Even despite the many differences, there is one striking point; that it's a hierarchy. That was most clearly articulated, in Western philosophy, in neo-platonism, which is the source of the mystical tradition of Christianity. I think even Hegel retains many element of that, and also arguably Heidegger. But in general terms, it is precisely that hierarchical structure which has been discarded in modern thinking.

As regards what can and can't be known - an awful lot depends on what you mean by 'known'. Quite often mystical and gnostic understanding is grounded in trance or rapture - the suspension of discursive thought. So what can be 'known' in such states is nothing like we call 'empiricial truth'. That is why it resorts to symbolism to communicate those ideas. Deep and difficult questions of interpretation in all that, would take volumes to spell out.

Why do you think he would have disagreed with Voegelin? — Agustino

Maybe he would have come to see God as an absolute immanence, and thus to have come to think that his writings about the transcendence of God were "as straw". It's not really a point worth arguing about, in any case, since what he thought can only be speculated about.

Eckhart — Agustino

I am not familiar enough with the writings of the other two to comment; but Eckhart speaks extensively about becoming God, so he might be seen as a thinker of the immanence of God. He expressed a kind of panthentheistic vision of God, and was charged with heresy for that.

Well it is precisely Voegelin's point that there is something which cannot be known - which will forever exceed the human grasp, even though it can be experienced and encountered, but it can never become object - the known. — Agustino

For me this is an extremely facile point, There are many things which can be "experienced and encountered" for example, love, truth, beauty, hope, faith, etc., in that sense known, which cannot become objects. All this says is that not all of human experience is of determinate empirical objects. But this is trivially and self-evidently so.

There is nothing that will forever exceed the human grasp, nothing that is, that could ever be anything to us, nothing that it could be, therefore, coherent to talk about.

Eckhart speaks extensively about becoming God... — John

ahem, I think not. He got charged with heresy for saying much less. 'Divine union' is not the same as 'apotheosis'.

I can't see a difference that makes a difference between the idea of becoming God and becoming one with God. The idea of apotheosis may be aligned with this in its sense of being a highest point of development or a culmination, but has nothing at all to do with its alternate sense of being elevated to the status of being a divinity, as were some of the roman emperors, for example. Eckhart was arguably a panentheist and on this view God is immanent in everything. It is much like the Buddhist notion that everything is the Buddha. No one thing or being, can rightly be elevated to an exclusive divine status on this view.

So, it seems that what you have in mind as a disagreement cannot have been with anything I have been speaking about.

The difference is that in Christian thought, the idea of 'becoming God' would be a grave heresy. There is the idea of theosis, or divine union, but that is not understood as the aspirant 'becoming God'. It's really not that important in the our context but it would have been in the context in which such ideas originated.

As regards what can and can't be known - an awful lot depends on what you mean by 'known'. Quite often mystical and gnostic understanding is grounded in trance or rapture - the suspension of discursive thought. So what can be 'known' in such states is nothing like we call 'empiricial truth'. That is why it resorts to symbolism to communicate those ideas. Deep and difficult questions of interpretation in all that, would take volumes to spell out. — Wayfarer

I won't say that others don't have wordless raptures. I won't pretend to believe in "round squares," though. I've had some "peak" experiences that I associate with symbols elaborated conceptually, lit, in theory, by primordial images. They are treasures that make my life better ---without, however, obliterating the need to struggle in this world and eventually die a personal death. They just light the world up and make it easier to love life (which includes my death).

I don't know where Being came from. I don't think an answer could even make sense. All such answers seem to be necessarily mystifications. It's not so much that I idolize the rational but rather a matter of authenticity. If I don't have a clear and distinct idea, I don't want to pretend to myself otherwise. I'm not saying this about you, but it's reasonable to hypothesize that some of these "round squares" are themselves just abstract "irrational" myths, resonating as promises. Nothingness, for instance, is beautiful. I remember Sartre's Being and Nothingness on the shelf at a bookstore when I was a teen. What kind of book was this? What words were more beautiful? Negation, generality, transcendence of everything particular toward that which is most universal and eternal. Indeed, that's the genius in the total anarchy of the concept of Christ 'm attached to. All finite systems that want to dominate are set aside, at least for this divine man of the human imagination, elaborated conceptually in terms of iconoclasm's journey toward "at-home-ness."

Is this first-person report "mysticism"? It doesn't matter. I do like staying close to conversation and away from "mystification." If the symbols work (to some degree) irrationally, I call it emotion or feeling. Why not? Feeling is nakedly the source of value. Concepts are here in our dialogue.

If others report or expect something more, that's OK with me.

The trouble is, in this context, that Sartre and Nietzsche were avowed atheists. (I wrestled with Being and Nothingness as an undergraduate, I literally couldn't get past the first page, although I have since formed the view that I didn't miss anything. )

What I'm trying to convey is that 'mysticism' is neither a matter of concepts nor feelings. When you ask 'what could it be', you have to actually engage with it on its own terms to discover that - like, spending time at a zendo or on a retreat. What happens with the mystical path is that you see through or past the verbal and symbolic mind, you learn to perceive with a different part of the brain (and there is actually research on this i.e. James Austin Zen and the Brain).) But this discussion is really serving to illustrate the point - you're an extremely well-read and perceptive thinker, but you can't make head or tail of what mysticism is about. And it's because it is a different cognitive mode - hence terminology such as 'noesis', 'gnosis', and the other specialised lexicon that is associated with it. And that's about all there is to it.

Mysticism is more or less an attempt to put Being in experience. Not the symbolic representation of some part of the world or logic (e.g. nothingness, happiness, a tree, my cricket team, Being etc.), but a presence of Being itself. As if my experience was living the Being of everything and/or anything, rather than merely a description of it. An experience of living rather than merely knowing or thinking. Understanding of that which is beyond knowing or describing.

I do love your epic use of nongrammar and also agree totally

. Well it is precisely Voegelin's point that there is something which cannot be known - which will forever exceed the human grasp, even though it can be experienced and encountered, but it can never become object - the known.

It strikes me that this is speculation on Voegelin's part. How do we know that the human mind, or body is not designed to experience transcendence and how can we conclude that an experience cannot be known. Transcendent experiences which can be known and recollected cannot be understood, perhaps, but that is different from knowledge of them. I know this because I have had such experiences, such that cannot be understood, or easily conveyed and may perhaps only be known via experience. But I do know the experience I had and recollect it and attempt to creatively convey the experience.