Spiritual knowledge is “public” because it can be communicated, shared, and transmitted. Wilber (1990) argues that spiritual knowledge is no more “private” and incommunicable than mathematical knowledge (i.e., geometric theorems are public knowledge to trained mathematicians but not to non-mathematicians). Spiritual knowledge is public knowledge to all contemplatives and mystics because it can be communicated and shared from teacher to student (e.g. the transmission of Buddha’s enlightenment all the way down to present-day Buddhist masters). A trained consciousness is a public, sharable, and intersubjective consciousness; otherwise it could not be trained or communicated in the first place.
What does it mean to say we can have “empirical verification” of a spiritual experience? According to Wilber (1990), to say that we can have “empirical verification” of a psychological (mental) or spiritual (psychic) experience simply means that we have some sort of direct, interior, immediate evidence (or data) for our assertions that we can publicly check (confirm or refute) with the aid of someone trained or educated in the domain. Both mathematical knowledge and spiritual knowledge are forms of “internal” knowledge. There is no external sensory proof that –12 = 1 and no microscope or telescope have yet spotted the psyche. The truth of such internal knowledge, nevertheless, can be validated and proven to be true by a community of trained peers who know the interior conventions of psychological experience (or the interior conventions of mathematical deduction) and who decide whether the direct apprehension is true or not.
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So far we have been discussing mystical consciousness as a simple expansion of normal creative capacity, in which the primary creative impulse is tied to already existing knowledge (i.e., customs, traditions, conventions, dogmas, sacred teachings) and constrained and limited by past learning and institutional memory (i.e., instrumental injunctions, illuminations, communal validation) of the world religion. One can also conceive of the possibility, however, of experiences of mystical consciousness that surpass normal creative capacity in the sense of exceeding or going beyond existing custom and convention about how to experience enlightenment (“instrumental injunctions”), what a mystical experience is supposed to look like (“direct apprehensions”), and whether one’s private vision and version of the “unknown” reality is valid and real by checking it with other’s visions and versions and the “official” line. (“communal confirmation.”).
The “unknown” reality of mystical consciousness. Transpersonal writer and mystic Jane Roberts (1977a, 1979b) tells how the “unknown” reality of mystical consciousness is “an ocean with many shores” (Jorge Ferrer’s phrase) and that spiritual knowing is a participatory affair between the individual and the universe, viewed through one’s own unique vision – valid, experiential, and “not therefore unreal, but one of the appearances that reality takes” (Roberts, 1979b, p. 398). Private visions and unique understandings of what William James (1936) called “the higher part of the universe” (p. 507) as an individual experiences it may be quite legitimate, real, and valid even though they would be regarded as “mistaken” because they do not conform with conventional doctrine or official religious dogma. Why should we be forced to interpret our unique mystical experience in the terms used by those who had gone “before” in order to make it more legitimate, acceptable, and believable? Why should we be concerned or worried if our private interpretations of transcendent realities do not agree?
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