Reality and Mystical Experience

by F. Samuel Brainard

Overview

Responding to our modern disillusionment with any claims to absolute truth regarding morality or reality, this book offers a conceptual approach for discussing absolutes without denying either the relevance of divergent religious and philosophical teachings or the evidence supporting postmodern and poststructuralist critiques.

Case studies of mysticism within Advaita-Vedanta Hinduism, Madhyamika Buddhism, and Nicene Christianity demonstrate the value of this approach and offer many fresh insights into the metaphysical presuppositions of these religions as well as into the nature and value of mystical experience.

Like Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, this book finds ultimate reality to be rationally graspable only as an eternal fugue of pattern and paradox. Yet it does not so much counter other philosophical views as provide a conceptual tool for understanding and classifying incommensurable views.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271030210
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	02/15/2000
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

F. Samuel Brainard received his doctorate in religion from Temple University. During his varied career he has taught religion at Temple and Rutgers-Camden, served as financial vice president of an electronics manufacturing firm, owned and operated a bookstore, and been involved with two nonprofit organizations, one focusing on holistic health and the other on interreligious understanding.

Table of Contents

	Preface and Acknowledgments	xi
1.	Introduction	1
1.1	Overview	1
1.2	Strategy Considerations	4
1.3	Project Sources and Structure	6
2.	Publicity-Presence-Awareness Terminology	11
2.1	Summary of the Terminology	11
2.2	Publicity	13
2.3	Presence	18
2.4	Awareness	21
2.4.1.	Awarenesses Originate Publicity and Individuate Presence	21
2.4.2	Awareness, Inert Matter, and the Two Universes	23
3.	Implications of the Terminology for Discussing Reality	27
3.1	Reality and Truth	27
3.1.1	The Real as Publicity and Presence Taken Together	27
3.1.2	The True as the Publicity of Reality Taken by Itself or a Correspondence to That Publicity	28
3.1.3	Hermeneutics	30
3.2	Paradox	31
3.2.1	The Paradox of Presence	31
3.2.2	The Mutual Exclusion of Publicity and Presence	35
3.3	The Two Roles of Awareness	38
3.3.1	Conjunctive-Disjunctive Dualism	38
3.3.2	Logical Versus Efficient Cause	40
3.3.3	Human Identity's Relationship to Space and Time	42
4.	Mystical Experience	49
4.1	Introduction	49
4.2	Nominal Versus Real Definitions	50
4.3	"Mystical Experience" as a Coherent Linguistic Category	52
4.4	Nonordinariness and Profundity as Defining Parameters	54
4.4.1	Nonordinariness	55
4.4.2	Profundity	57
4.5	The Conventional, the Mystical, and Publicity-Presence-Awareness Terminology	60
	Three Case Studies
5.	Buddhism and Madhyamika Mysticisim	69
5.1	Introduction	69
5.2	The Advent of a Metaphysics of Presence	70
5.2.1	The Buddha's Teaching on the Nature of Reality	70
5.2.2	Appropriation of the Buddha's Teachings	75
5.2.3	Nirvana	84
5.3	Metaphysical Difficulties in Early Buddhism	91
5.3.1	The Fracturing of Buddhist Orthodoxy Prior to Nagarjuna	91
5.3.2	The Problems of Presence as a Philosophical Foundation	94
5.3.3	Mahayana	97
5.4	Nagarjuna	101
5.4.1	The Madhyamika School of Buddhism	101
5.4.2	Nagarjuna's Dialectic	103
5.4.3	Sunyata	107
5.4.4	Nirvana and Samsara	109
5.4.5	The Two Truths: Samvrti Satya and Paramartha Satya	111
5.5	Conclusion	115
6.	Hinduism and Advaita-Vedanta Mysticism	127
6.1	Introduction	127
6.2	Hinduism's Metaphysics of Publicity	129
6.2.1	Hindu Orthodoxy and the Vedas	129
6.2.2	Brahman and Atman	132
6.2.3	Moksa	139
6.3	Metaphysical Difficulties in Early Hinduism	144
6.3.1	Different Views of the Absolute	144
6.3.2	Mimamsa	147
6.3.3	Haituka Schools	151
6.3.4	Vedanta	155
6.4	Sankara	156
6.4.1	Advaita-Vedanta	156
6.4.2	The Psychology of Advaita-Vedanta	160
6.4.3	Levels of Being	165
6.4.4	Maya	167
6.4.5	Moksa	170
6.5	Conclusion	173
7.	Christianity and Dionysian Mysticism	185
7.1	Introduction	185
7.2	Nicene Christianity's Orthodoxy of Dualism	187
7.2.1	The Human Soul	187
7.2.2	God Transcendent and God Incarnate	193
7.2.3	Christian Metaphysics and the Presence of God	202
7.3	Metaphysical Difficulties in Early Christianity	210
7.3.1	Christian Heresies	210
7.3.2	Internal Theological Conflicts	213
7.3.3	Some Theological Issues in the Western Church	216
7.4	Pseudo-Dionysius	220
7.4.1	Dionysian Mysticism	220
7.4.2	Kataphasis	225
7.4.3	Apophasis	233
7.5	Conclusion	239
3.	Reality and Mystery	251
8.1	Introduction	251
8.2	Reality and Conventional Awareness	252
8.2.1	Metaphysical Incommensurability	252
8.2.2	Metaphysical Ultimacy and Primordial Paradox	254
8.2.3	Toward a Metaphysics of Types	256
8.3	Reality and Mystical Awareness	263
8.3.1	Mystical Ultimacy	263
8.3.2	Mystical Variety	265
8.4	Publicity-Presence-Awareness Terminology as a Metaphysical Paradigm	267
	Glossary	273
	References	275
	Index	285

Editorial Reviews

Here are promising new pathways of philosophic dialogue across religious and cultural borders. Brainard has with chutzpah and creative insight invented a new terminology for comparing classical accounts of mystical experience, East and West. Close to Whitehead, and augmenting some of the efforts of Peirce, Polanyi, and Wittgenstein, he proposes a phenomenological scheme for philosophizing, once again, about the ALL, without doing violence to the plurality of particular linguistic practices in which encounters with the ALL are described. Brainard’s book is sure to awaken dormant debates on the relations among language, experience, and divinity.”

—Peter Ochs, University of Virginia

“Brainard’s careful arguments help move the philosophical discussion beyond the presently dominant paradigm of contextualism. For this reason alone Brainard’s book is valuable.”

—Kenneth Rose Journal of the American Academy of Religion

From the Publisher