Expanding the Common Ground of the World's Mystical Traditions

Expanding the Common Ground of the World's Mystical Traditions

missing works cited

ABSTRACT: This paper addresses religious epistemology in that it concerns the assessment of the credibility of certain claims arising out of religious experience. Developments this century have made the world’s rich religious heritage accessible to more people than ever. But the conflicting religious claims tend to undermine each religion’s central claim to be a vehicle for opening persons to ultimate reality. One attempt to overcome this problem is provided by "perennial philosophy," which claims that there is a kind of mystical experience common to all religious traditions, an experience which is an immediate contact with an absolute principle. Perennialism has been attacked by "contextualists" such as Steven Katz who argue that particular mystical experiences are so tied to a particular tradition that there are no common mystical experiences across traditions. In turn, Robert Forman and the "decontextualists" have argued that a certain kind of mystical experience and process are found in diverse traditions, thereby supporting one of the key elements of perennialism. I review the contextualist-decontextualist debate and suggest a research project that would pursue the question of whether the common ground of the world’s mystical traditions could be expanded beyond what has been established by the decontextualists. The extension of this common ground would add credibility to the claims arising out of mystical experience.

It is appropriate at this conference to address — however narrowly and briefly — an important twentieth-century development in the world's religious life. Advances in scholarship, communication, transportation, and mass education have made the richness of the world's religious heritage accessible to more people than ever before. But this increased accessibility has not strengthened religious belief, but may, in fact, have had the opposite effect. This is because the revolution in accessibility to the world's religious traditions has made more people than ever before aware of the conflicting claims of the world's religions. Of course, each tradition's adherents believe their tradition to be the primary expression of the truth, but there seems to be no obvious "non-partisan" way to determine which tradition has superior credentials. Thus the conflicting claims of competing religious traditions tend to undermine each religion's central claim that it is a vehicle for opening oneself to ultimate reality. One attempt to overcome this problem is provided by "so-called perennial philosophy school," to use the term used by Robert K.