Volume 4 Issue 2 Fall 2018

1 8 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 4 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 8 2 HowMany? I suppose the question now becomes, how many people have these experiences? Conservative estimates put the number anywhere between thirty and fifty percent (Bourque and Back 1971; Bourque 1969; Yamane and Polzer 1994). And note, it is not just the uneducated who have these experiences. The limited sociological research that has been conducted on the phenomenon has found that those with more education are equally likely, if not more likely, to have profound mystical experiences (Bourque and Back 1971; Bourque 1969). Educated Westerners just don’t conceptualize it in the same way as others. Instead of using language and concepts provided to them by priests and gurus, they use a secular and psychologically neutral language. The educated characterize mystical experiences as peak experiences (Maslow 1971; Maslow 1962), transcendence experience (Maslow 1971), “pure consciousness events” (Forman 1999), or as Albert Einstein put it, “cosmic religious feeling” (Einstein 1930). There are a lot of different names for the same core experience. I think, arguably, if we were to open the field and synchronize our definitions, we would find that most people have mystical experiences. Indeed, Abraham Maslow found exactly this. His surprise at the ubiquity of religious experience is expressed in the following quotation: In my first investigations… I used this word because I thought some people had peak-experiences and others did not. But as I gathered information, and as I became more skillful in asking questions, I found that a higher and higher percentage of my subjects began to report peak-experiences… I finally fell into the habit of expecting everyone to have peak-experiences and of being rather surprised if I ran across somebody who could report none at all. Because of this experience, I finally began to use the word ‘non-peaker’ to describe, not the person who is unable to have peak-experiences, but rather the person who is afraid of them, who suppresses them, who denies them, who turns away from them, or who ‘forgets’ them (Maslow 2012, 340–1). He goes on: At first it was our thought that some people simply didn’t have peaks. But, as I said above, we found out later that it’s much more probable that the non-peakers have them but repress or misinterpret them, or-for whatever reason-reject them and therefore don’t use them. Some of the reasons for such rejection so far found are: (1) a strict Marxian attitude, as with Simone de Beauvoir, who was persuaded that this was a weakness, a sickness (also Arthur Koestler). A Marxist should be ‘tough’. Why Freud rejected his is anybody’s guess: perhaps (2) his 19th century mechanistic-scientific attitude, perhaps (3) his pessimistic character. Among my various subjects I have found both causes at work sometimes. In others I have found (4) a narrowly rationalistic attitude which I considered a defense against being flooded by emotion, by irrationality, by loss of control, by illogical tenderness, by dangerous femininity, or by the fear of insanity. One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in bookkeepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people (Maslow 1962). It is interesting to me that Maslow suggests that Freud, notorious for his opinion that religion was an infantile human delusion (Freud 1964), had his own mystical experience, but that he “rejected” it for an unknown reason. Maslow suggests it is because of the mechanistic bias of 19th-century science, or perhaps his pessimistic personality. Freud, it would seem, had a mystical experience, maybe more, but came down hard against its validity and utility. So what are we to make of this? Unless we want to discount the evidence, and people’s experience, we need to accept the fact that at least a lot, if not most (and perhaps all) people have mystical experiences, whatever those might be, and that these experiences form the basis of their belief in things beyond the material world. Since I am not the kind of scholar to discount people’s experience, and since I wholeheartedly agree with both Walter Stace who says that mystical experience is “a psychological fact of which there is abundant evidence” (Stace 1960a), and with Abraham Maslow who thinks that everybody has mystical experiences, but some people deny or misrepresent, for personal, emotional, or psychopathological reasons that have nothing to do with the reality or science of it all, I’m going to accept the reality of mystical experience. You, the reader, can believe whatever you want.

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