Instrumental injunctions as interior conventions that limit experience. The epistemological requirement that knowledge gained in a mystical experience is considered valid only if other individuals adequately trained in the injunction confirm it rigidly limits, orders, and stratifies experience of “the higher part of the universe” (James’s phrase). The “instrumental injunctions” (Wilber’s phrase) become interior conventions that, like outer ones, force the individual seeker to conform to the generally accepted ideas of what it means to be “enlightened” and to make his or her inner experience (“direct apprehensions”) conform to preconceived packaging (“communal verification”) form by quite conventional religious beliefs that makes certain experiences possible and hides other very real realities that the seeker then does not perceive.
Different religions turn the founder’s original interpretations into dogmatic conventions. When the founders of the major world religions (Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Mohammud) gave their disciples a series of injunctions designed to reproduce in the disciples the spiritual experiences of the founder, those directions represented original interpretations, individual versions of paths beyond ego to transcendent realities. Those individual founders, interpreting their initial experiences to the best of their abilities, provided quite valid accounts of the transcendent realities they encountered, explored, and communicated to their disciples. The pictures of supreme reality that the different founders brought back with them, however, varied considerably from one another. The version of supreme reality that Jesus encountered (a personal God) varies considerably from the one that Buddha experienced in a different part of the world (an impersonal Nirvana). If we expect photographs of our own exterior physical world to be diverse according to where we go, why should we expect or require all of the “pictures” of interior transcendent realities to look alike?
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Instrumental injunctions program experience ahead of time. At one time the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed represented initial original visions and individual interpretations of supreme reality expressed in terms that the people of that time and place could understand – otherwise they might make no sense to them. Having heard the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed, the disciples would begin to clothe their own private visions of supreme reality (or God) – as he or she experienced it - in the guise of the ideas, concepts, and images embodied in the teachings of the founders. The disciples no longer insisted upon their own private visions and unique expressions of the transcendent realities that they encountered when they carried out the required injunctions. After all, who would accept them? Later, after consulting beforehand with those who have been adequately trained in the injunction (“If you do this, then you will experience this”) and told what to expect, individual experiences of new disciples became programmed ahead of time. Programmed ahead of time, individuals would perceive data according to the conventions, custom, and dogmas that had now become established. The clear vision, the original interpretation, the individual reaction, the unique expression and vision of the founders and subsequent disciples became lost. If one’s inner experience did not conform, then it would be called “mistaken,” and you would be considered an outcast or at worst a heretic. And who wants that given the consequences of such a path?
There is a difference between psychic reality and the maps given to us to depict it. Guided tours of transcendent reality in which disciples are told to follow certain injunctions in order to experience the “same” thing rigidly limits experience and behavior rather than express it. In certain terms, mystical consciousness deals with the very nature of creativity itself. As such, the individual may want to experience “the higher part of the universe” directly through his or her own perceptions, as divorced from the customs and conventions set forth by the injunctions, teachings, and communal confirmations (or rejections) of those who have gone “before.” Those experiences are also valid and legitimate – are not therefore unreal and “mistaken” - but represent other appearances that the “unknown” spiritual reality may take and a picture of a very real environment that others could but do not perceive because of temperament, educational training, past experience, or cultural conditioning.
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