At the start of my 40s, I went back to university to study a Master’s degree. A decade of teaching later, I wound up contributing to the same course – an M.A. in Traditions of Yoga and Meditation at SOAS (University of London).
As I prepare to host The Path of Knowledge – a year-long immersion in yogic ideas – I’ve been revisiting some of what I wrote as a post-graduate student. A sample from one of my essays is attached, discussing experience as a potential source of evidence. In the process, it examines how scholars and practitioners look at things differently.
My new course combines both of these perspectives, and aims to facilitate communal inquiry. Along the way, we’ll see how engagement with yogic traditions can help us to clarify what really matters – in terms of everyday life, as well as teaching and practice.
Although we’ll draw on academic research about yoga history, that’s just a framework for exploring evolution, and how we relate to it – the course concludes with a project that will help you to integrate what you’ve learned with your own priorities.
As the website explains, there’s no obligation to write a long essay, and if you chose to submit one it wouldn’t be graded (unless you’d find that helpful). Instead, the idea is to support the emergence of new ways of seeing – whether in the form of writing, visual art, plans for teaching a course, or whatever else appeals.
It’s basically a chance to reflect on your life through the prism of yoga. We discussed this last week in a live Q&A, which is available for replay below. Click the button to find out more and apply – and email me here if you have any questions!
*** 🐦 N.B. early bird rates end on June 15 – apply before then to save 15%… 🙌 ***
An essay from 2014
Are You Experienced? How Can I Tell?
By Daniel Simpson
Like many in the past half-century in the West, I first encountered meditation in a book. Its title seemed to sum up the process: Experience Beyond Thinking.1 As such, it said more about modern preoccupations. So intense is the yearning for “Headspace” that a self-help app of that name has more than a million stressed subscribers. Contemporary interest in altering consciousness has its pitfalls, potentially skewing our views of texts, as well as the contexts they arise in. Practitioners and scholars can see the world through different lenses, which are challenging to reconcile.
Experience can sometimes be verified, for example when it relates to occupation. If someone claims to have taught at SOAS, we can check. But the meanings concerning us here pertain to private inner states. We cannot observe what another perceives, just what they say about it, or the neural activity it entails. This is complicated further by the kinds of experience under the spotlight, which access insight by transcending cogitation. They amount to: “I do not think, therefore it is.” And yet precisely what it is, we cannot say.
Nonetheless, many people have tried, undeterred by what Robert Sharf calls the “logical impossibility” of a first-person account of deep absorption, in which mental processes seem to shut down.2 Discussing this sort of transcendence makes it end. Hence someone reporting a mystical incident speaks from memory, one step removed from a non-dual state that defies definition, because of its non-conceptual nature.3 This yields reflections like Aldous Huxley’s on taking mescaline, which reduced him to “being my Not-Self in the Not-Self which was the chair”.4
To Huxley and fellow Perennial philosophers, such forms of immersion are encounters with divinity, and thus the core of all religion: awakening to the bliss of pure awareness. However, as Sharf and others argue, scholars “do not have access to mystical experiences per se, but only to texts that purport to describe them, and the perennialists systematically misconstrue these texts” to fit their universalised assumptions.5 Stripped of context, they might sound alike, but Sharf finds “little internal evidence to indicate that these very disparate accounts are actually referring to one and the same experience”.6
For over a century, blurring boundaries has been popular. Richard King sees this as part of “the modern privatization of religion”, an experiential defence against secular refutation.7 A lifetime before Jimi Hendrix asked: “Are You Experienced?” William James framed “true religion” in similar terms, which have “almost become received wisdom”, as King identifies: “the private, religious and mystical experiences of individuals”.8 James had allies in Asian contemporaries, from Hindus such as Vivekananda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan to the Japanese Buddhist D. T. Suzuki, who all posited forms of experience accessible to anyone regardless of creed.9
Their syncretic approach foreshadowed photo quotes on Facebook, decontextualising insights from the scriptures that interpret them. In Vivekananda’s view, studying texts was merely “intellectual opium-eating”, notes Anantanand Rambachan.10 Their contents were “useful only to the extent that they confirm what one has known directly”. At best, they might function as maps, which “can create only curiosity for first-hand knowledge of the place and can communicate only a vague conception of its reality”. They “become meaningful only when one has lifted oneself to the same heights of perception”.
Vivekananda’s remix of Vedānta was couched in Western-friendly terms. But he channelled the Upaniṣadic notion that the ultimate reality cannot be conceptually defined: words can only say what it is not. Therefore analysis of ancient texts might seem superfluous. Sharf begs to differ. “While meditation may have been esteemed in theory, it did not occupy the dominant role in monastic and ascetic life that is sometimes supposed,” he concludes from a survey of Buddhist treatises, whose authors were at pains to avoid giving personal testimony.11 Though the texts speak of meditative states, important terms remain unclear. Some are even contradictory, which suggests they were scholastic attempts to align early teachings with subsequent commentary.12 The writers may have tried to induce what they thought the Buddha had experienced, as opposed to explaining how they copied him.
“This is not to deny that veteran Buddhist meditators have ‘experiences’,” Sharf concedes, “just that the relationship between what they ‘experience’ and what they say about it is far more tenuous than is sometimes believed.”13 Sharf's bugbear is the “unremitting indeterminacy” of “experience”, which acts as a placeholder word “for the endless deferral of meaning”.14 On one hand, what people read can shape what happens to them, while on the other, their own perception seems invalid unless it conforms to expectations. And since no one defines what means what, and no one can, “Buddhist meditation might best be seen as the ritualization of experience”, with spiritual accomplishments subject to external validation, according to someone else's arbitrary criteria.15
Related problems apply to adherents of all traditions. Significance is socially constructed in multiple ways, not least in language in our heads. With an echo of Immanuel Kant, Richard Cohen contends we can only perceive phenomena, whereas the “noumena” of things “as they are”, untouched by thought, remain elusive. “Sense experience never operates in an unmediated fashion,” Cohen says.16 “What seems to be direct perception of worldly objects is, in fact, always already an amalgam of sense impressions and intellection.”
ALL IN THE MIND?
Such assertions were debated intensely in the 1980s. Most scholars agreed that a “context-free” experience was unfeasible, although some critics of constructivist theory saw a flaw. “If one’s experiences are socially constructed,” King observes, “how can one ever come up with anything new?”17 Even so, a consensus emerged around the tenets of constructivism, deeming “views from nowhere” as unrealistic as “views from everywhere”: cultural conditioning was bound to determine how we interpreted experience, and no experience was fully detached from interpretative processes.
Robert Forman led the voices of dissent, advancing a compromise he alludes to in his memoir. “Some experiences I shape a lot, some less, and a few are genuinely unexpected,” Forman writes.18 “When we encounter something off our chart, our prior expectations just can’t be creating it. We cannot cook up what we cannot imagine.” In other words, sensory space is preserved for the “pure consciousness events” he experienced as a meditator.19 “In these brief moments, one is aware of no particular content for awareness, yet still remains awake,” he reports. “We might describe the ‘structure’ of experience at those moments as consciousness having no relationship between itself and its objects.”
Post-structuralists would find this absurd, because of our consciousness of language, which entraps us in our minds.20 Without objects against which to define its sense of self, how could a subject still exist? According to Forman, by being enlightened. “One now knows oneself to be spacious, bottomless, open and empty,” he explains.21 “And this new vastness is sensed as separate from everything one sees or thinks.” Perceiving itself as the witness of all experience, consciousness shifts. And yet while Forman repeatedly calls this a “permanent” shift, he only accepted it 20 years after it occurred.
Everything changed in a conversation with Ram Dass, the American author of Be Here Now, and in the Sixties a Harvard-based evangelist for psychedelic drugs.22 “I narrated the expansion of silence,” Forman recalls. “He understood.” Then, “looking deep into my eyes with his bottomless gaze and a kindly smile of recognition, he said simply, ‘yeah, this is that’.” Whereupon Forman felt confirmed in his enlightenment. “All my wonderings and confusions and disillusionments simply vanished,” he reflects, before recounting how he bawled his eyes out in a toilet. “Finally I could be sure I wasn’t making all this up.”
The irony in this admission goes unmentioned. Instead, he explores his reasons for self-doubt. He was expecting more powerful change from “cosmic consciousness”, as his guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi called the objective. Straightforward silence seemed too simple by comparison. It offered no “cure for heartaches”, or the panic attacks that had plagued him since his youth. “Because it wasn’t what I had hoped for,” Forman muses, “I missed what it was…”23
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Diana St Ruth, Experience Beyond Thinking: A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation (Totnes: Buddhist Publishing Group, 1993).
Robert Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience,” Numen, 42, no. 3 (1995), p. 237.
Robert Sharf, “The Rhetoric of Experience and the Study of Religion,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7.11-12 (2000), p. 277.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954), p. 8.
Sharf, “The Rhetoric of Experience,” p. 270.
Ibid.
Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 12.
Ibid., pp. 21-2.
Ibid., pp. 156-8.
Anantanand Rambachan, “The Nature and Authority of Scripture: Implications for Hindu-Christian Dialogue,” Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Vol. 8, Art. 4 (1995), p. 23.
Sharf, “The Rhetoric of Experience,” p. 272.
Martin Stuart-Fox, “Jhāna and Buddhist Scholasticism,” The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1989), pp. 79-110.
Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism,” p. 233.
Ibid., p. 268.
Ibid., p. 269.
Richard Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment: Buddhism, Religion, Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 11.
King, Orientalism and Religion, p. 169.
Robert Forman, Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be: A Journey of Discovery, Snow and Jazz in the Soul (Winchester: O Books, 2011), p. 84.
Ibid., p. 70.
Harold Coward, “Derrida and Nagarjuna,” in Harold Coward, Derrida and Indian Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 138.
Forman, Enlightenment Ain’t, pp. 70-72.
Ibid., pp. 72-75.
Ibid.